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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. Back in the day, when you needed some specialty cable or switch box Radio Shack is just where you went because they either had it or could look in their huge catalog and get it in a couple of days. Remember, there was no internet shopping and most of the other retailers had a spotty selection at best. Demand for cables and the other things they sold has only gone up in the last decade, but Radio Shack went under because places like Monoprice sell things like cables for what they are actually worth and there is no need to pay a 1000% markup anymore. The best electronic stores were the ones with plywood shelves and an older guy with coke-bottle glasses behind the counter who still had a supply of vacuum tubes available. The_Franz has a new favorite as of 04:55 on Jan 6, 2016 |
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Jan 6, 2016 04:52
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I love the onion article that is like "Radioshack CEO doesn't even know how they're in business" http://www.theonion.com/article/even-ceo-cant-figure-out-how-radioshack-still-in-b-2190
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Jan 6, 2016 05:16
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Hillary Clintons Thong posted:I love the onion article that is like "Radioshack CEO doesn't even know how they're in business" I worked there til the very end, too. The store I worked at not only still exists, but still exists as a standalone radio shack instead of how they've mostly been rebranded as sprint/radio shack. A friend of mine and I made out like bandits near the end - sealed Galaxy and Moto X phones for like $200 each, enough batteries and that kind of stuff to last me till the end of time. One store had to close so fast they didn't have time to ship a lot of the cheaper poo poo out. I bought the entire contents of all their parts drawers for $120. It filled a large garbage bag and I still haven't finished sorting through it almost a year later.
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Jan 6, 2016 05:21
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but radioshack batteries are the worst
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Jan 6, 2016 05:22
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when i heard radioshack was closing i went to the nearest one and asked if i could have everything in the whole store for free and they said ok. so now i own like a dozen RC helicopters.
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Jan 6, 2016 05:22
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This was the first song I ever got on my computer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaF-nRS_CWM
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Jan 6, 2016 05:26
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the first "songs" I had on a computer were MIDI files i dunno where i got them they were mostly movie themes like indiana jones and jurassic park mixed in with classical pieces
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Jan 6, 2016 05:27
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thathonkey posted:the first "songs" I had on a computer were MIDI files i dunno where i got them they were mostly movie themes like indiana jones and jurassic park mixed in with classical pieces And then you had the MOD/S3M scene 
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Jan 6, 2016 05:28
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This is still one of my favorite pieces of music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a6I0FBo0O4
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Jan 6, 2016 05:29
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I would download midi versions of Top Gun songs onto a 3.5in at the one computer with internet access that students could use, then come home and jam them as the music to Jane's games.
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Jan 6, 2016 05:30
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Hillary Clintons Thong posted:but radioshack batteries are the worst Fun fact they actually test as well as Energizer/Duracell, and considering they were called EnerCell for years without getting sued, I wouldn't be surprised if they came from the same factory. Hell, very often the watch cell batteries were literally Energizers. thathonkey posted:when i heard radioshack was closing i went to the nearest one and asked if i could have everything in the whole store for free and they said ok. so now i own like a dozen RC helicopters. yeah the parts thing was luck on my part because i got it all at once but once most stores got really low they literally did grab bags where you paid them $5/10/20 and they gave you a bag of varying size and let you go to town, if anybody needs like 500 screen protectors lmk
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Jan 6, 2016 05:35
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thathonkey posted:the first "songs" I had on a computer were MIDI files i dunno where i got them they were mostly movie themes like indiana jones and jurassic park mixed in with classical pieces http://www.vgmusic.com/ I spent so much loving time/bandwidth on that website, there are probably at least 2 or 3 files on there that I made even
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Jan 6, 2016 05:36
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I was messing around with Windows 3.1 in DOSBox, and it turns out that some of the MIDIs I remembered were not from Windows itself, but from Sound Blaster 16. Have some reggae with a dancing weasel or something? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CU2CzS26u6k
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Jan 6, 2016 06:13
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LOVE LOVE SKELETON posted:My first mp3 player: These things were awesome, I loved that you could pull it apart and the one piece was just a USB flash drive. I had the 256 MB one, it had a screen: 
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Jan 6, 2016 06:25
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http://news.yahoo.com/star-trek-cre...WQDBHNlYwNzcg-- Roddenberry's old floppy disks from nearly 30 years ago are finally opened. quote:While these disks contain just 160 kilobytes of data each, they’re likely to be of great interest to fans of the series and of Roddenberry himself. However, it seems that there are currently no plans to share the files at present, as the contents of the disks are still under the possession of the Roddenberry estate. I'm sort of wondering if it's not so much that they were custom PC/custom OS but just some oddball computer that was little-used and obsolete even by the time of his death and the software was saved in a strange format. JediTalentAgent has a new favorite as of 06:54 on Jan 6, 2016 |
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Jan 6, 2016 06:50
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Amiga OS strikes again
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Jan 6, 2016 06:59
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Marv Hushman posted:Re: wasted youth Fire up an emulator and relive your youth https://archive.org/details/compute-gazette https://archive.org/details/ahoy-magazine
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Jan 6, 2016 07:00
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My dad used to work at a Radio Shack. He got me a lovely IR wireless NES controller from there once because he got tired of my pup chewing up the standard controller cables. Dog gnawed the poo poo out of the IR receiver on day one. Controller sucked anyway. Data Graham posted:This is still one of my favorite pieces of music: I was pissed when Microsoft replaced this with something lovely in DXdiag 9: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2V4dr_EYZ0
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Jan 6, 2016 07:09
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Marv Hushman posted: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. PC Magazine had some decent little tools you could type in. I don't think I ever tried doing anything like typing in a page of hex values 
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Jan 6, 2016 08:57
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Folks posted:RADIOSHACK    
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Jan 6, 2016 09:56
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Oh wow, I remember having one of those. Though of course, as a kid having no patience to actually read the book I mainly used it to make annoying screeching noises from the buzzer.
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Jan 6, 2016 10:10
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Build radios! Amplifiers! Code Oscillators! Circuit! S.
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Jan 6, 2016 11:20
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Zveroboy posted:Oh wow, I remember having one of those. Though of course, as a kid having no patience to actually read the book I mainly used it to make annoying screeching noises from the buzzer.  YyyyyyupI still remember the feel of bending those springs to stick wires in. I think I remember being disappointed that they didn't all go twonnnnggg like those ankle-high door stoppers so I couldn't play a symphony on them.
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Jan 6, 2016 12:49
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This is the exact one I had. I remember being disappointed in how poorly the "lie detector" project worked.
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Jan 6, 2016 13:15
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you were warned posted:I was messing around with Windows 3.1 in DOSBox, and it turns out that some of the MIDIs I remembered were not from Windows itself, but from Sound Blaster 16. Have some reggae with a dancing weasel or something? ah I bet that is where I got mine as well. do sound cards still come with a bunch of weird rear end software or have they calmed down on the unnecessariness
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Jan 6, 2016 14:20
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Zveroboy posted:Oh wow, I remember having one of those. Though of course, as a kid having no patience to actually read the book I mainly used it to make annoying screeching noises from the buzzer. My parents bought me one because they thought it would stop my habit of taking apart the family electronics to see how they worked. I also only ever used it to annoy people. The same Christmas they also got me a chemistry set, that I used to start a huge fire on my bedroom carpet. If I were my parents I would have beaten me to death.
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Jan 6, 2016 15:20
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CaptainSarcastic posted: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. Then when the other phone companies sprang up, there were some seriously odd long distance rules. Back in 1986, in my area (Rockford, IL) we had what evolved from Illinois Bell to Ameritech to AT&T. My girlfriend who lived a county over in Belvidere had GTE (now Verizon). I could call her for free, but it was long distance for her to call me. But she could call Rockton-Roscoe which was even further away from Belvidere but it was free because they were GTE, too.
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Jan 6, 2016 16:07
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Anyone post about handheld LCD games yet? These pre-dated the Game Boy and, unless I wanted to lug around a bunch of heavy books, they were all I had to occupy myself on long road trips when I was like 7 or 8. Nothing was truly random so you'd figure out the patterns after a while, and from then on it was just about reflexes because each difficulty level was just the same thing but faster. These were the only ones I had (lol poor) but there were a lot of others.  
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Jan 6, 2016 16:49
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Skeleton Ape posted:These things were awesome, I loved that you could pull it apart and the one piece was just a USB flash drive. I had the 256 MB one, it had a screen: Hell yeah, MuVos. I I bought this in 2004 I think, 1 GB version for like $170 at the time. e: 
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Jan 6, 2016 17:07
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WescottF1 posted:Then when the other phone companies sprang up, there were some seriously odd long distance rules. Back in 1986, in my area (Rockford, IL) we had what evolved from Illinois Bell to Ameritech to AT&T. My girlfriend who lived a county over in Belvidere had GTE (now Verizon). I could call her for free, but it was long distance for her to call me. But she could call Rockton-Roscoe which was even further away from Belvidere but it was free because they were GTE, too. I remember those days, and when one of the companies dropped long distance rates to 10 cents a minute, and being blown away at how cheap it was to call the next town over. If you grew up in a small town like I did, where everyone had the same prefix, you could call only using the last 4 digits.
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Jan 6, 2016 17:09
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CaptainSarcastic posted: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. After the Ma-Bell breakup a bunch of small long-distance companies popped up and the way they worked was that you had to call a local access number, enter your code and then make your call. Since the codes had to be entered manually they were usually short and it didn't take long for programs to appear that generated codes, tried calling a long distance number and saved the number for later if it worked. Bingo, free long distance calling for a month. These small companies couldn't really do anything about it since there was no caller ID and no way to identify who was calling outside of the access code. Getting records from the phone company wasn't easy and even if you had the records, good luck finding and correlating anything in the huge volume of calls these companies received. This basically worked until around 1990 when direct-dialing via a third-party long-distance company became possible.
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Jan 6, 2016 17:15
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 Still have one of this bad boys. You needed an external port (IEEE iirc) to upload up to 128mb of 128kbps. The late 90's were awesome.
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Jan 6, 2016 17:29
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WescottF1 posted:Then when the other phone companies sprang up, there were some seriously odd long distance rules. Back in 1986, in my area (Rockford, IL) we had what evolved from Illinois Bell to Ameritech to AT&T. My girlfriend who lived a county over in Belvidere had GTE (now Verizon). I could call her for free, but it was long distance for her to call me. But she could call Rockton-Roscoe which was even further away from Belvidere but it was free because they were GTE, too. To be fair, she got charged for calling you because she was tying up the one phone in Belvidere for way too long. (Chicagoon here, did undergrad at NIU, worked in Belvidere for a summer)
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Jan 6, 2016 18:36
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The_Franz posted:After the Ma-Bell breakup a bunch of small long-distance companies popped up and the way they worked was that you had to call a local access number, enter your code and then make your call. Since the codes had to be entered manually they were usually short and it didn't take long for programs to appear that generated codes, tried calling a long distance number and saved the number for later if it worked. Bingo, free long distance calling for a month. These small companies couldn't really do anything about it since there was no caller ID and no way to identify who was calling outside of the access code. Getting records from the phone company wasn't easy and even if you had the records, good luck finding and correlating anything in the huge volume of calls these companies received. This basically worked until around 1990 when direct-dialing via a third-party long-distance company became possible. Yep - I'd set up a "War Dialer" program and go to bed. Wake up in the morning with a handful of long distance codes that would work for a bit and call Diversi-DIAL and other BBS systems around the country. Once the codes stopped working, just repeat the process over and over. Worked a charm.
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Jan 6, 2016 18:38
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I had that same set, but my parents let me use it when I was too young so I just pulled a few pieces out of it and it was missing poo poo. Made the lie detector project too and was very disappointed, though at the time I blamed it on having to use the wrong resistors since I ripped out the useful ones. Jyrraeth has a new favorite as of 20:08 on Jan 6, 2016 |
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Jan 6, 2016 19:55
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Jyrraeth posted:Made the lie detector project too and was very disappointed, though at the time I blamed it on having to use the wrong resistors since I ripped out the usefule ones. I bet if you had the right resistors that lie detector would have worked perfectly!
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Jan 6, 2016 19:57
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WescottF1 posted:Yep - I'd set up a "War Dialer" program and go to bed. Wake up in the morning with a handful of long distance codes that would work for a bit and call Diversi-DIAL and other BBS systems around the country. Once the codes stopped working, just repeat the process over and over. Worked a charm. One thing that I am legit sad about is that I missed the era of wardialing/phreaking. God that poo poo sounded fun. 
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Jan 6, 2016 20:00
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Code Jockey posted:One thing that I am legit sad about is that I missed the era of wardialing/phreaking. Yeah, the mid 80s were a fun time to be online. Everything was local, so the chat systems and BBSs had tons of parties. I met a lot of friends with whom I still see regularly and/or on Facebook. And of course the, "git off mah lawn!" aspect that you actually had to know your way around a computer to be able to go online. One quick look at your local news channel's Facebook page or YouTube comments and you can see what making the Internet so simple has caused.
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Jan 6, 2016 21:01
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Then again it's not like the people who were into computers back in the day were somehow more savory characters on the whole than their modern counterparts are. not to impugn your work, sir
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Jan 6, 2016 21:53
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Data Graham posted:Then again it's not like the people who were into computers back in the day were somehow more savory characters on the whole than their modern counterparts are. Eh, a lot of people back then weren't doing things like generating calling card numbers with a "screw the phone company" mindset. Long distance rates were still kind of crazy at that point so it was more of a "well, I want to call these places, but I can't afford a $500 a month phone bill with my allowance or job".
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Jan 6, 2016 22:28
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