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PDP-1 posted:
Hell ya, Beagle Bros. They had all the coolest hacker-type software. The best thing they did was ProntoDOS which made DOS 3.3 so much faster to use. I had it on so many of my floppies that when I'd find one without it, it was like running in lead-soled shoes. The best was the backs of their floppy sleeves, where you'd usually find helpful icons about how to care for your floppies--avoid magnets, don't expose to heat, etc.  They weren't just smart, they had a great sense of humor, too.
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Jan 6, 2016 22:45
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I'll be honest, I want that 5.25" toilet paper dispenser
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Jan 6, 2016 22:55
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On a similar bent to wardialing / phreaking (that I wish I was around more for, the closest I got to it was successfully "red boxing" a small town payphone) there was the big thing of C-band satellite piracy in the 80s. Basically no corporation or company had any real interest in providing people with out-of-the-box satellite television. So people were taking it upon themselves to learn and build their own satellite reception systems, start small businesses setting rural people up with dishes since they couldn't get cable, sell homemade devices, and most infamously hack descramblers to get free programming. Early on all satellite feeds were unscrambled just because up to that point no one had the equipment in their backyard to watch any of it, and the only people with dishes were dedicated earth stations. The channels over satellite were intended to be distributed to cable companies for them to rebroadcast, so there wasn't a real clear need to obscure the signals in any way. As a result, C-band early adopters got free access to all the channels they could pick up, which drove the sales of receivers, dishes, dish pointing motors and so on. Once C-band really started to take off in a consumer way, a lot of programming companies began scrambling their signal so that only cable companies could use it. This didn't make people happy who spent thousands of dollars on their satellite setup to get free cable channels, so a cottage industry of descrambler hacking popped up almost overnight. To be fair they were sort of justified in it because most of the people who started scrambling the satellite signal either wanted arbitrarily more money to sell it to satellite owners, or they straight up wouldn't sell it to them at all. This lead to the somewhat well known "Captain Midnight" hack complaining about HBO's pricing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbruOe6Yii0 People selling "testing equipment" (read: mod chips that let you get free premium channels) for Videocipher II boxes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ojj8Zz6Omac One satellite dealer from New Jersey that had the enormous balls to broadcast a program, ON SATELLITE! about exactly how to pirate satellite. The program was called "Piss on VC II" and literally opened with him pissing on a descrambler box. He had an almost pathological hate of General Instruments, the company that built the VC II boxes. Then he fell off a roof and died in 1992. He also sold videos detailing exactly what you had to do to modify a descrambler, in detail, here's one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyjbtAarEu4 It was estimated that at one point there were more illegally modified VCII boxes receiving programming than real, authorized legal ones, and that the company that manufactured them, General Instrument, was actually complicit in this. They only made money selling descrambler boxes, and what kind of box sells better: one that you have to pay out the rear end to get HBO on, or one that gives you everything for free? I find this poo poo fascinating and would love to see or read a real documentary about it; there's plenty of info out there if you find it interesting, though. Piracy just isn't the same anymore.
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Jan 6, 2016 22:58
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God that owns, great post  A friend of mine had one of those fuckoff giant sat dishes and it was awesome browsing the huge amount of international channels he got.
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Jan 6, 2016 23:04
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powerofrecall posted:On a similar bent to wardialing / phreaking (that I wish I was around more for, the closest I got to it was successfully "red boxing" a small town payphone) there was the big thing of C-band satellite piracy in the 80s. Basically no corporation or company had any real interest in providing people with out-of-the-box satellite television. So people were taking it upon themselves to learn and build their own satellite reception systems, start small businesses setting rural people up with dishes since they couldn't get cable, sell homemade devices, and most infamously hack descramblers to get free programming. Early on all satellite feeds were unscrambled just because up to that point no one had the equipment in their backyard to watch any of it, and the only people with dishes were dedicated earth stations. The channels over satellite were intended to be distributed to cable companies for them to rebroadcast, so there wasn't a real clear need to obscure the signals in any way. As a result, C-band early adopters got free access to all the channels they could pick up, which drove the sales of receivers, dishes, dish pointing motors and so on. Once C-band really started to take off in a consumer way, a lot of programming companies began scrambling their signal so that only cable companies could use it. This didn't make people happy who spent thousands of dollars on their satellite setup to get free cable channels, so a cottage industry of descrambler hacking popped up almost overnight. To be fair they were sort of justified in it because most of the people who started scrambling the satellite signal either wanted arbitrarily more money to sell it to satellite owners, or they straight up wouldn't sell it to them at all. I recently watched some stuff about the Captain Midnight and Max Headroom TV signal hacks. Oddity Archive on youtube has pretty decent mini-docs about both of them: Captain Midnight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkTsoP5v2GM Max Headroom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUwt-JFSQx4
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Jan 6, 2016 23:08
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Ratjaculation posted:Somethingawful
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Jan 6, 2016 23:15
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On the satellite note, in the late 90's a friend's father had a satellite card programmer. Satellite boxes know what services you have or don't based a little credit-card-sized card with a SIM-card-style chip on it. This guy had a little box (connected via 9-pin serial) that he could use to reprogram the cards and unlock everything. I'm talking not just HBO and Showtime, but PPV movies, the porno channels, the whole shebang. Every couple of months DirecTV would send a signal that would fry illegally programmed cards, but he had a big stack of them and would just hop on the web, find the newest codes, and make a new card. I'm surprised he never got caught doing it, I feel like DirecTV would have made an example of him, since he was selling the unlocked cards online. When I lived in Boston I always dreamed of doing a similar thing with the MBTA (bus/subway system) cards, but apparently it took an entire team from MIT to crack those and IIRC the NSA or FBI got involved real quick.
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Jan 6, 2016 23:45
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drunk asian neighbor posted:On the satellite note, in the late 90's a friend's father had a satellite card programmer. Satellite boxes know what services you have or don't based a little credit-card-sized card with a SIM-card-style chip on it. This guy had a little box (connected via 9-pin serial) that he could use to reprogram the cards and unlock everything. I'm talking not just HBO and Showtime, but PPV movies, the porno channels, the whole shebang. Every couple of months DirecTV would send a signal that would fry illegally programmed cards, but he had a big stack of them and would just hop on the web, find the newest codes, and make a new card. I'm surprised he never got caught doing it, I feel like DirecTV would have made an example of him, since he was selling the unlocked cards online. It was one of the satellite companies who, after a big retailer of hack gear got raided, just blindly sued everyone who ever bought anything from them. People were getting letters demanding several thousand dollar settlements and that they sign papers admitting that things that have nothing to do with satellite TV, like Dreamcast mod chips or cables, were bought for the purpose of defrauding Dish or DTV.
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Jan 7, 2016 00:01
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drunk asian neighbor posted:On the satellite note, in the late 90's a friend's father had a satellite card programmer. Satellite boxes know what services you have or don't based a little credit-card-sized card with a SIM-card-style chip on it. This guy had a little box (connected via 9-pin serial) that he could use to reprogram the cards and unlock everything. I'm talking not just HBO and Showtime, but PPV movies, the porno channels, the whole shebang. Every couple of months DirecTV would send a signal that would fry illegally programmed cards, but he had a big stack of them and would just hop on the web, find the newest codes, and make a new card. I'm surprised he never got caught doing it, I feel like DirecTV would have made an example of him, since he was selling the unlocked cards online. DirecTV's "Black Sunday" hack was pretty legendary http://blog.codinghorror.com/revisiting-the-black-sunday-hack/
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Jan 7, 2016 02:22
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The_Franz posted:It was one of the satellite companies who, after a big retailer of hack gear got raided, just blindly sued everyone who ever bought anything from them. People were getting letters demanding several thousand dollar settlements and that they sign papers admitting that things that have nothing to do with satellite TV, like Dreamcast mod chips or cables, were bought for the purpose of defrauding Dish or DTV. My friend and I got hit by one of those notices when we used to mess around with his families PrimeStar box. Luckily his dad had given us his blessing, and even ordered us some card stuff to help crack it. (My friends dad loved piracy. He gave me Doom 2!) So anyways, we got a letter, but since my friend was under 18 (by 6 or so years) his dad just kind of shrugged and said "Well it's addressed to Ethan, so just ignore it and I bet nothing happens." Nothing did.
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Jan 7, 2016 02:42
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an AOL chatroom posted:DirecTV's "Black Sunday" hack was pretty legendary This is pretty cool. How much do operations like this cost (everything from brainstorming to planning to execution, including the previous card-killing updates before the hack) compared to the profits lost from signal-jacking customers? I have a feeling it's not actually worth it.
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Jan 7, 2016 02:45
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Exploding the Phone is a good book about how phreaking started. On an unrelated note, if there's not enough retro IT stuff in this thread for you, here's an old thread with some more.
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Jan 7, 2016 03:17
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I started a thread a while ago that's still ongoing over in PYF on obsolete and failed tech, also. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3495621
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Jan 7, 2016 03:25
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 Everyone had those speakers.
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Jan 7, 2016 08:05
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40x? Scrub, you need 52x  Sounded like a jet engine for a minute every time you booted up with a CD in the tray.
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Jan 7, 2016 08:14
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Fun fact, the reason drives never increased beyond 52x was that at those rotational speed there's a real risk of the disc shattering from the centrifugal forces. The manuals would warn about inserting damaged or cracked disks, and if something actually exploded inside the drive good luck getting all the fragments out! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zs7x1Hu29Wc
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Jan 7, 2016 08:23
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I like how manufacturers realized that nerds like to eat behind them PCs and stopped making everything white. Like that Kensington switch few pages ago.
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Jan 7, 2016 08:28
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Buttcoin purse posted:Exploding the Phone is a good book about how phreaking started. Thanks for the book rec, ordered a copy. Looking forward to checking it out.
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Jan 7, 2016 09:13
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I took a technology class in middle school circa 2002-3. Mostly we were supposed to be learning to type but didn't have an actual typing program, so we just typed ilthe assignments into the OS9 equivalent of notepad. I usually copy-pasted my work, then proceeded to read textfiles about phreaking and hacking. Somewhat blissfully unaware that most of this stuff was likely long obsolete by that point. There were also textfiles that were pretty much anarchist cookbook-lite. Ostensibly supposed to be pranks, most of that stuff probably would have gotten you into tons of legal trouble if you ever tried it. Probably not something I should have been exploring on a school computer a few years after Columbine. Have to wonder how the kids who spent all their time typing this poo poo up in the first place turned out.
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Jan 7, 2016 09:41
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The first time my parents bought me any computer games (instead of just getting  from people they worked with), here's what they got:SimEarth: I don't know if this is actually meant to be an educational game for kids or adults. It had a pretty thick book with it and pre-teen me wasn't that interested. I guess it might have been useful if I had learned about the conditions under which amoeba thrive or something, if I had actually become a biologist, but all I remember learning was that if you set off a bunch of nuclear explosions, then I think that made robots evolve. Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego? I don't remember. Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?  Deluxe Edition This came out in 1990, when you could get plenty of VGA games, but rather than 320x200x256 like everything else, this was 640x480x16. It was highly dithered but it was  HIGH RES which was amazing, I better be careful not to bust the tables with this poo poo:  But I don't remember it being too hard, I think you just used to have to go "hmmm the places I can travel are either Bangkok, Amsterdam or Tijuana, and someone said she was converting her money into Baht, let me look in this World Almanac book to see which one of those has Baht as the currency". I don't think much of that sunk in. And finally Prince of Persia: As already mentioned, this was awesome. One out of four isn't bad. I learned that skeletons can come back to life. Now when did I actually learn something useful from a game? Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 taught me "lefty loosey, righty tighty." Thank you Tony Hawk.
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Jan 7, 2016 12:36
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Oh yeah, also we all know DOOM was pretty cool, but some of you might not be aware that people have made new engines for it with all sorts of modern OpenGL features, and other people have made 3D models for the enemies and objects and new high-res textures, so with some effort downloading and installing stuff you can play DOOM and it can look like this: and it has mouselook and otherwise behaves like a modern game, so you can play DOOM again without being annoyed by its behavior or appearance.
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Jan 7, 2016 13:01
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I never liked playing Doom with 3D models actually. I always thought that the original sprites had more character. Seriously though, it's incredible what's been done with the Doom engine since it became open-source. It's a 22 year old game and there's still a decent sized community making new maps and mods, some of which are barely Doom, for example rail shooters, RPGs and Myst-like adventures.
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Jan 7, 2016 13:24
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Your saying you don't like how DOOM looks today (well, if you use new models) reminds me of If Doom was done today 
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Jan 7, 2016 13:46
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That was incredibly frustrating to watch.
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Jan 7, 2016 14:33
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Buttcoin purse posted:Oh yeah, also we all know DOOM was pretty cool, but some of you might not be aware that people have made new engines for it with all sorts of modern OpenGL features, and other people have made 3D models for the enemies and objects and new high-res textures, so with some effort downloading and installing stuff you can play DOOM and it can look like this: Playing doom like this sucks actually 
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Jan 7, 2016 15:19
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Mak0rz posted:Playing doom like this sucks actually It sucks even more if you try to adapt it as a UNIX interface. quote:psDooM can monitor processes with shareware Doom 1, registered Doom 1, Ultimate Doom, or Doom 2. 'Plutonia Experiment' and 'TNT - Evilution' will run, but no process monitoring will be done.  (must be kinda fun if the only tasks you ever needed to accomplish on UNIX were killing processes)
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Jan 7, 2016 15:29
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Buttcoin purse posted:The first time my parents bought me any computer games (instead of just getting This reminded me of when my parents brought me home a secondhand copy of TurboCAD, complete with giant dog-eared manual held together with rubber bands. My high school spoiled me by having an entire lab full of CADKEY machines; they were all Amstrad 8086's, but holy gently caress 3D wireframe modeling on them was efficient and sweet and I loved the goddamn semi-textual interface. Creating arcs tangent to lines, circles through three points, extruding a shape and rotating it... I wanted for nothing. The school's brand-new 486 sat in a corner playing SimCity while I happily plunked away on those Amstrads, which were the only machines enabled to run CADKEY by a parallel-port dongle. I remember the hard drives of the day (the kind you had to "park" before shutting down) made squeaking sounds when reading data instead of clicking like they do today. I could never get TurboCAD to run. 
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Jan 7, 2016 15:38
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Buying a copy of RedHat (and the install manual) at CompUSA in 1997
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Jan 7, 2016 18:15
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Bonzo posted:Buying a copy of RedHat (and the install manual) at CompUSA in 1997 RedHat in the box was like $60 so I went for the $30 massive third-party Redhat book which included a single CD in the back. It didn't have everything the full distribution had, but at the time (early 2000s) I was running Linux on a 486 with a 1GB drive so I didn't have a lot of room/power for additional programs anyway.
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Jan 7, 2016 18:20
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Buying a copy of Netscape navigator 3.0 gold
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Jan 7, 2016 18:26
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woodch posted:I recently watched some stuff about the Captain Midnight and Max Headroom TV signal hacks. Oddity Archive on youtube has pretty decent mini-docs about both of them: Thanks for sending me down that rabbit hole. I spent the entire evening last night watching OA videos. Good stuff!
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Jan 7, 2016 18:33
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blood was the superior build engine game
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Jan 7, 2016 18:35
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ColoradoCleric posted:blood was the superior build engine game obligatory: GEORGE.TXT
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Jan 7, 2016 18:46
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Bonzo posted:Buying a Linux distribution theultimo posted:Buying a web browser lol
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Jan 7, 2016 19:32
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mng posted:40x? Scrub, you need 52x No, non-scrubs had Plextor 40x CAV SCSI drives. 52x IDE CD-ROM drives were the cheap scrub garbage.
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Jan 7, 2016 19:43
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buying a copy of Internet Yellow Pages because search engines had lovely indexes. Also manually submitting your site to search engines so it could be indexed. SEO in the 90s was pretty much a nightmare.
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Jan 7, 2016 19:52
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Casimir Radon posted:I took a technology class in middle school circa 2002-3. Mostly we were supposed to be learning to type but didn't have an actual typing program, so we just typed ilthe assignments into the OS9 equivalent of notepad. I had to take a typing class in school that was similar but i knew how to type so instead I installed half-life and played on mute. Another kid noticed and wanted it by the end of the schoolyear we hd a pretty solid LAN deathmatch group going. Actually learned a lot that way. Teacher probably knew and just didnt give a fux
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Jan 7, 2016 20:05
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ColoradoCleric posted:blood was the superior build engine game All of the big four Build games were pretty rad, actually! Duke 3d, Blood, Shadow Warrior and Redneck Rampage were all great fun.
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Jan 7, 2016 20:22
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Tumble posted:All of the big four Build games were pretty rad, actually! Duke 3d, Blood, Shadow Warrior and Redneck Rampage were all great fun. Lost countless hours to all of them except Redneck Rampage. Think it's hold up to a playthrough now? Also the original Hexen was so loving badass at the time.
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Jan 7, 2016 21:28
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PinkoBastard posted:Lost countless hours to all of them except Redneck Rampage. Think it's hold up to a playthrough now? Not a chance. Duke, Wang, and Blood are still fun to play, but RR did not age nearly as well. PinkoBastard posted:Also the original Hexen was so loving badass at the time. Hexen ran on the Doom engine, not Build 
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Jan 7, 2016 21:40
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