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John Xerox posted:Virus talk -- Archive.org have just now launched a museum of malware where you can see various DOS malware in action: https://archive.org/details/malwaremuseum https://archive.org/details/malware_AIDS_552.COM
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# ? Feb 5, 2016 15:42 |
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# ? May 13, 2024 21:56 |
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Remember when wordperfect still competed with ms word
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# ? Feb 5, 2016 15:59 |
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thathonkey posted:Remember when wordperfect still competed with ms word Is it still used in the legal profession? I think that was the last 'holdout'
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# ? Feb 5, 2016 16:17 |
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Jose Oquendo posted:Is it still used in the legal profession? I think that was the last 'holdout' I work for an agriculture economic department, they're still a few hold outs that use it here.
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# ? Feb 5, 2016 16:20 |
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This one was the first I had that would generate all the terrain elevation and textures with an algorithm, or had textures on the ground at all for that matter.
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# ? Feb 5, 2016 16:42 |
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But if you actually wanted to fly, there was only one game in town, written in 386 assembler with a flight model that used 387 floating point coprocessor instructions for those lucky bastards that had one.
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# ? Feb 5, 2016 16:53 |
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Jose Oquendo posted:Is it still used in the legal profession? I think that was the last 'holdout' The main reason is that MS Word has a mind of its own when it comes to document formatting especially when you import from other sources. If you try to import a WordPerfect template into Word, all of your formatting goes to poo poo. Since the legal world relies on paperwork, it's just easier to fill out the template that was created in 1985 instead of doing it all over again. I've seen law offices with an old DOS machine in the corner running WordPerfect 5.1 and it gets used maybe once a month but it works so why replace it? Most private practices also have paralegals and admin personnel that have been doing the same job for 25 years and they are not going to re-learn everything. Speaking of office staff using old poo poo; I know a guy who is in his late 50s and makes good money on the side writing Excel macros for small accounting firms. He's currently pissed off because there are rumors that Microsoft is going to stop licensing VBScript and remove it completely from the Office Suite.
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# ? Feb 5, 2016 17:30 |
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I don't think he has anything to worry about. So many companies have random processes totally dependent on random excel vba scripts that no one knows the origin of.
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# ? Feb 5, 2016 17:35 |
Germstore posted:I don't think he has anything to worry about. So many companies have random processes totally dependent on random excel vba scripts that no one knows the origin of. They're very handy if you don't have access to a proper database or know how to use one. I can code a little, and built an octopus-like monstrosity at my last job that pushed stuff in and out of a few dozen sheets to update inventory and maintenance daily. I have no idea how to implement a proper database setup from the ground up with no IT support. The last thing I did before I quit was go through and comment everything, hopefully no one has moved any files from their hard-coded locations or changed the drive letter for the network drive!
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# ? Feb 5, 2016 17:40 |
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Bonzo posted:Speaking of office staff using old poo poo; I know a guy who is in his late 50s and makes good money on the side writing Excel macros for small accounting firms. He's currently pissed off because there are rumors that Microsoft is going to stop licensing VBScript and remove it completely from the Office Suite. Licensing it from whom? Isn't it their own creation?
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# ? Feb 5, 2016 19:09 |
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somebody posted it last page but I had forgotten all about Paint Shop Pro. haha what a piece of absolute garbage that software was. especially given that photoshop was around at the time. but iirc it was a fraction of the cost. that only mattered if you were too stupid to
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# ? Feb 5, 2016 19:31 |
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Blonde and snobby-looking. uh oh, Seth Able's not gonna give you extra LORD turns for that answer
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# ? Feb 5, 2016 19:56 |
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thathonkey posted:somebody posted it last page but I had forgotten all about Paint Shop Pro. haha what a piece of absolute garbage that software was. especially given that photoshop was around at the time. you shut your loving mouth
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# ? Feb 5, 2016 20:01 |
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stubblyhead posted:Licensing it from whom? Isn't it their own creation? Like most of their stuff, they bought it off someone in the early 90s and slowly folded it into Windows. I know they stopped updating VBA in 2010 and they only work since then it making to compatible with 64 bit CPUs. Either way they don't seem to have much interest in it anymore and most of the enterprise Admins I meet lock down their environments to keep people from running macros. Especially since some phishing scams work by users opening malicious attachments in Outlook. thathonkey posted:somebody posted it last page but I had forgotten all about Paint Shop Pro. haha what a piece of absolute garbage that software was. especially given that photoshop was around at the time. In 1996 I ordered a computer from TigerDirect. Since it was it came with WordPerfect Suite and Corel Draw. In addition to the install CDs you had 4 CDs full of clip art of 2 or 3 books with an index of the clipart pictures and told you witch CD it was on and the file name. Bonzo has a new favorite as of 20:06 on Feb 5, 2016 |
# ? Feb 5, 2016 20:03 |
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Where I work (large UK retailer) we still have Lotus Ami Pro on most of our machines. It takes me ages to do anything due to the strange shortcuts etc. For instance , right-click opens up the font menu!
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# ? Feb 5, 2016 21:25 |
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The Kins posted:Oh, cool! I loved old 16-color icons when I was but a wee Win 3.1 user. My first boss and a coworker designed all the Win 3.1 icons. They are also responsible for the desktop themes including the infamous Hot Dog Stand. I did a ton of toolbar icons for Word and Excel early. Microsoft was actually a really fun place to work in the early-mid '90s. For several years in the summer they had an outdoor thing every Friday at about 4 with free food and beer and wine. Our whole division would get to go to a movie a few times a year on a weekday morning. It might be hard to believe but back when I started Word and Excel were underdogs against Word Perfect and Lotus 123. When Microsoft became dominant with Office and the antitrust thing happened a lot of the fun went out of it. One thing that is way different now is that user experience was not really considered critical back then. It was hard to sell ideas because we were just "the icon team". For instance there were only two designers who did all the work on Win 95. One guy was assigned to Word, another to Excel but even they did other projects. I was the designer for the first version of Outlook. That took over three years to hammer out. If you hate Outlook be thankful we didn't go with some of the goofy directions we considered early on
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# ? Feb 5, 2016 22:55 |
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Bonzo posted:
In 1996 I worked for a company that did poo poo like flyers and business cards. The guy who ran it was an old rear end in a top hat and still did mockups for flyer jobs in letraset and rubylith in like 1995. I knew Photoshop and some prepress stuff but didn't dare question his authority since he payed me. They had a guy who did everything for small runs in Corel Draw and sent the files to the IT Guy / Digital Prepress. I did the stuff like cutting, media feeding, etc. So the old guy who ran the shop was always bitching about everything tells me to grab some 27"x40" stock and place it in the feeder roller for the big rear end IBM digital press. I grab a roll, carry it to the machine (poo poo weighs like 60 lbs) and set it in the slats for the roller. It locks in and then the glorified pentium that runs the machine beeps saying "Incorrect feed" or some such poo poo. The old guy wallows over and picks up the roll, and slams it up and down twice. The machine barfs up an error, and he goes apeshit and starts blaming me. In short, I get fired. The It guy follows me to my desk and apologizes. On the way out I grab my stuff from the office, including a giant rear end binder of CD's and this book: I have never opened or used any of that crappy clipart, yet it still sits on my shelf as a reminder of how terrible that job was.
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# ? Feb 6, 2016 00:10 |
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Keith Atherton posted:the infamous Hot Dog Stand. I made a bet with a guy at work that he couldn't use that theme on his Windows 7 machine for a week. He did it but by day 4 he was having some issues looking at his monitors. He said reading email was the worst.
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# ? Feb 6, 2016 00:21 |
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Keith Atherton posted:My first boss and a coworker designed all the Win 3.1 icons. They are also responsible for the desktop themes including the infamous Hot Dog Stand. I did a ton of toolbar icons for Word and Excel early. I do recall Lotus 123 being THE spreadsheet program. It was the first I used and still use the slash commands in Excel which came up a few pages back. E: I worked for a good while for a company that owned and operated fast food restaurants. I was their "computer guy" but also maintained cost-of-goods-sold spreadsheets, massive macro driven sheets that took all the ingredients purchased data, sales data and ultimately spit out a number that told you if you were wasting food or skimping or had theft issues or whatever. That sheet and its macros was invaluable. I should have copied it when I left. Realistically there's some website that is free that could do the same but it was slick as hell. Sten Freak has a new favorite as of 00:55 on Feb 6, 2016 |
# ? Feb 6, 2016 00:47 |
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Sten Freak posted:It is so hard to consider, even at that stage, such small development teams working on iconic projects like that. I still use Lotus Notes on a daily basis.
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# ? Feb 6, 2016 00:51 |
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Keith Atherton posted:That took over three years to hammer out. If you hate Outlook be thankful we didn't go with some of the goofy directions we considered early on My main gripe with Outlook are the obtuse settings packed into small dialogue boxes where it's a nest of buttons and tabs - I do wonder how much of that is legacy as I know it's been like that for at least a decade.
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# ? Feb 6, 2016 00:58 |
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fuckingtest posted:In 1996 I worked for a company that did poo poo like flyers and business cards. The guy who ran it was an old rear end in a top hat and still did mockups for flyer jobs in letraset and rubylith in like 1995. I knew Photoshop and some prepress stuff but didn't dare question his authority since he payed me. They had a guy who did everything for small runs in Corel Draw and sent the files to the IT Guy / Digital Prepress. I did the stuff like cutting, media feeding, etc. So the old guy who ran the shop was always bitching about everything tells me to grab some 27"x40" stock and place it in the feeder roller for the big rear end IBM digital press. I grab a roll, carry it to the machine (poo poo weighs like 60 lbs) and set it in the slats for the roller. It locks in and then the glorified pentium that runs the machine beeps saying "Incorrect feed" or some such poo poo. The old guy wallows over and picks up the roll, and slams it up and down twice. The machine barfs up an error, and he goes apeshit and starts blaming me. In short, I get fired. The It guy follows me to my desk and apologizes. On the way out I grab my stuff from the office, including a giant rear end binder of CD's and this book: Holy poo poo, my last graphic design job designing pennants and stuff had that and I used it on occasion for schools that were too lazy to have their own mascots. The book that came with it was freakin' massive. Also, the art in it is godawful.
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# ? Feb 6, 2016 01:35 |
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_WpEYAAmi8
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# ? Feb 6, 2016 01:57 |
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thathonkey posted:somebody posted it last page but I had forgotten all about Paint Shop Pro. haha what a piece of absolute garbage that software was. especially given that photoshop was around at the time. I used both in conjuction with each other. Photoshop for image manipulation, then over to PSP for text as it had better (or easier) tools for it at the time.
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# ? Feb 6, 2016 01:59 |
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WebDog posted:Now I'm curious. That was a nightmare to try to get right. Handling settings is tough because categories can end up arbitrary. At one point the settings dialog box was going to have three horizontal rows of tabs. If you clicked on a tab in the one of the top rows that row would jump down to the bottom row. Yeah. The left side row of icons to switch between contacts, mail, notes was a design that took a LONG time to arrive at. For quite a while the plan was to have a launcher dialog box that had a button for each app or folder. Which meant you'd have a separate window for each app. The program manager I worked with on the mail view wanted to have email forms look like actual physical mail and have a cancelled stamp image on the top right and the sender's info on the top left like a return address. It took a lot to convince him this was a bad idea. Likewise the Notes PM wanted the forms to look like Rolodex cards. Oh and when the web became a thing all of a sudden there was this big push to make the whole thing "web like" which meant they wanted animations and color and god knows what else. Luckily our baseline was 16 colors and 640x480 so that wasn't technically possible thank god. One bygone thing that was cool is that project teams would put in Easter eggs. Usually a credits list of everyone who worked on it but Excel once had a Doom-like thing you could walk around in. That all went away with the Trustworthy Computing Initiative in 2001 or so.
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# ? Feb 6, 2016 02:04 |
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Keith Atherton posted:One bygone thing that was cool is that project teams would put in Easter eggs. Usually a credits list of everyone who worked on it but Excel once had a Doom-like thing you could walk around in. That all went away with the Trustworthy Computing Initiative in 2001 or so. The good ol' "Hall of Tortured Souls" Easter-egg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwg9eLHZZRo
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# ? Feb 6, 2016 02:45 |
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Keith Atherton posted:That was a nightmare to try to get right. Handling settings is tough because categories can end up arbitrary. At one point the settings dialog box was going to have three horizontal rows of tabs. If you clicked on a tab in the one of the top rows that row would jump down to the bottom row. quote:Likewise the Notes PM wanted the forms to look like Rolodex cards. This is from Claris' File Maker Plus. Note the quasi-rolodex slider used to navigate through records. The version I used in the mid 90's was even more so adding little binder rings. Skeudomorphic UI design back then was pretty direct and lead to more confusion as people didn't necessarily get the analogies a UI intended. Case in point IBM's phone dialling program where you had to pick up the receiver to dial. Despite being a common action it befuddled people who expected the program to do some of the work for them, all they wanted to do was punch in the number and press call. quote:One bygone thing that was cool is that project teams would put in Easter eggs. Usually a credits list of everyone who worked on it but Excel once had a Doom-like thing you could walk around in. That all went away with the Trustworthy Computing Initiative in 2001 or so. Does using Microsoft BoB as filesize filler on the XP CD count as an Easter Egg? One oft alleged story is that the OS and Office groups barely work hand in hand which apparently lead to the short sheeting of Microsoft's TabletPC venture back in 2006 as the Office team didn't really want to put in the effort in developing touch optimised elements for their interfaces.
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# ? Feb 6, 2016 03:13 |
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Cross post from 90s thread Non Serviam posted:
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# ? Feb 6, 2016 03:14 |
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WebDog posted:Having lines of tabs that swapped rows was pretty common in Windows at the time. If you look really hard you might find some leftovers buried in an ancient settings prompt. Active Directory dialog boxes still do this in Server 2012 if I'm not mistaken.
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# ? Feb 6, 2016 03:22 |
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thathonkey posted:somebody posted it last page but I had forgotten all about Paint Shop Pro. haha what a piece of absolute garbage that software was. especially given that photoshop was around at the time. Hey! We used that to create/edit Doom sprites. It may not have been as feature-rich as Photoshop but it was still good for what it did. Speaking of Doom, I once bought this: (And, haha, yes, I've still got it. Along with my original Jagged Alliance disc)
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# ? Feb 6, 2016 04:26 |
Keith Atherton posted:That was a nightmare to try to get right. Handling settings is tough because categories can end up arbitrary. At one point the settings dialog box was going to have three horizontal rows of tabs. If you clicked on a tab in the one of the top rows that row would jump down to the bottom row. Yeah. "Make it web like", dear god. It's a nightmare that writes itself Dancing babies and Under Construction signs all over your email
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# ? Feb 6, 2016 04:33 |
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Gonzo the Eggman posted:Hey! We used that to create/edit Doom sprites. Haha I bought D!Zone as well. Never could get it to work though (I had Doom 95 for Windows).
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# ? Feb 6, 2016 04:42 |
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Police Automaton posted:I'd say piracy nowadays is easier than it ever was. Back then with no internet we had to get our pirated software off of friends, coworkers, relatives... including all the viruses you could fit on these disks. Granted, back then these would only make the computer act weird or delete a disk, not send your bank account credentials to chinese/russian mobsters.
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# ? Feb 6, 2016 04:57 |
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Corn Burst posted:Haha I bought D!Zone as well. Never could get it to work though (I had Doom 95 for Windows). "Over 900 new levels!" You never use even half the stuff on these kinds of discs. Aye carumba! Is that King's Quest VII in the top-right corner? It sure went cartoony since KQ IV - which we had on our old IBM monochrome 286.
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# ? Feb 6, 2016 04:58 |
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WebDog posted:Having lines of tabs that swapped rows was pretty common in Windows at the time. If you look really hard you might find some leftovers buried in an ancient settings prompt. Yeah I think I'm not remembering right. Scrolling tabs was one solution we considered. Like arrow buttons on the left and right of the tab row so you could scroll through tabs.
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# ? Feb 6, 2016 05:07 |
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Thanks for the stories!Gonzo the Eggman posted:Aye carumba! Is that King's Quest VII in the top-right corner? It sure went cartoony since KQ IV - which we had on our old IBM monochrome 286. The animation was handled by the Russian company that did the animation for those CD-i Zelda games, if that tells you anything.
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# ? Feb 6, 2016 05:07 |
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COMI had kind of a Disney aesthetic and it looked great. A proper sequel probably deserves some hand painted Deep Canvas type stuff.Police Automaton posted:I'd say piracy nowadays is easier than it ever was. Back then with no internet we had to get our pirated software off of friends, coworkers, relatives... including all the viruses you could fit on these disks. Granted, back then these would only make the computer act weird or delete a disk, not send your bank account credentials to chinese/russian mobsters.
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# ? Feb 6, 2016 05:16 |
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Gonzo the Eggman posted:Speaking of Doom, I once bought this: I still have that CD somewhere around here. Out of the 900+ levels only 30 or so weren't garbage or lazy object remaps of original Doom levels. I think they just blindly downloaded every file from ftp.cdrom.com/pub/idgames that ended in *.wad and tossed it on a CD. The D! launcher was pretty nice though.
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# ? Feb 6, 2016 05:24 |
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Keith Atherton posted:Yeah I think I'm not remembering right. Scrolling tabs was one solution we considered. Like arrow buttons on the left and right of the tab row so you could scroll through tabs. This site is great in listing some of the UI madness that persisted around 2000.
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# ? Feb 6, 2016 05:43 |
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# ? May 13, 2024 21:56 |
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Can't find it on youtube but in addition to the maze egg above as if you had clippy the paperclip do an animation 200 times or so in a row he flicked you a bird.
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# ? Feb 6, 2016 05:51 |