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computer parts posted:They've gone away now, but a lot of the local places had fax food delivery ordering. Just print out a PDF, fill in your information, fax it to them, and wait 20 minutes. Only to be replaced with this http://youtu.be/gW2D_Votd2Y
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Mar 21, 2016 03:43
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The_Franz posted:ISDN was basically the best you could get for most of the 90s unless you wanted to pay really big bucks every month for a T1. Toward the end of the dialup years, I actually owned TWO USR Couriers. One was a "throw this away for me" from work (WTF, really? OK!), and I was able to firmware upgrade it to the most recent V.90 standards. The second one, though, was very special to me. Behold!   That plaque is to identify it as a modem purchased under the "sysop buying program" from USR. I ran a lovely little BBS for a couple years, and was able to buy that thing for half price direct from USR--original MSRP was $1250 or something. Originally, it was a Courier "Dual Standard" HST, "HST" being USR's first foray into proprietary, a-symentrical speed boosting technology. There were earlier iterations of it, but the one I got did 14.4kbps at v.32bis standards, but when connected to another HST capable modem, it could negotiate a one-way path up to 16.8kbps (with the return channel being significantly nerfed--2400bps I think). The protocol could detect if more data was travelling the other direction, and flip/flop the channels on the fly. Pretty slick stuff that's probably wiki'd somewhere, but I digress. When 28.8kbps started happening, another sysop perk was getting the upgrade cheap. I had to buy a $100 replacement daughter board and install it into my modem. After that, firmware updates all the way up to v.90 for free. Was awesome. BTW, X2 connection sounds were cool. Anyway, back to when I was about to ditch these things... I had a buddy who worked at a local ISP that could handle the channel bonding setup for ISDN, and that just so happened to enable two regular modems to connect and channel bond as well. So for a while, I was reading the forums and shitposting at ~64kbps using 2 phone lines and 2 modems. A few months later I got my first cable modem and never looked back.
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Mar 21, 2016 03:51
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Kids growing up will never hear this http://youtu.be/gsNaR6FRuO0
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Mar 21, 2016 03:58
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Sort of a relic, but did anyone ever watch Computer Chronicles ? There are some episodes on YouTube and Archive.org. teen witch has a new favorite as of 04:20 on Mar 21, 2016 |
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Mar 21, 2016 04:17
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theultimo posted:Only to be replaced with this I shouldn't be surprised, but here we are, I am surprised. Got a good laugh at least. Don't ever stop Japan. I liked how the President was giving the whole thing a good college try.
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Mar 21, 2016 04:46
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My mom attempted to keep me off the internet when she wasn't around by using MSN Explorer with a password. However I discovered that you could start up the password retrieval section which would cause it to dial. Than you could just use Internet Explorer. She figured out that I'd found a way in when I tied up the phone line all day when I was home sick.
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Mar 21, 2016 05:06
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Anyone else have vague memories of I think K-mart offering a free/discounted internet service (Bluelight.com, I think)? It was that or another one that was heavily ad-supported to offset costs, and then users figured out how to kill the ads or something. edit: Found an article on the free internet era of the early 00s. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/01/business/days-of-plenty-are-over-at-free-internet-services.html JediTalentAgent has a new favorite as of 06:19 on Mar 21, 2016 |
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Mar 21, 2016 06:16
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I reember when Maddox would get a few hundred thousand views on an article in its first day, but now it barely gets that in a year. Poor guy.
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Mar 21, 2016 06:34
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drunk asian neighbor posted:I think I was using Pidgin in the last gasps of my IM days. Multi-client integration was pretty nice for the few international friends I had who used ICQ or MSN instead of AIM. I was the UX designer for MSN Messenger 6 in 2003 or so. Since I'd never used an IM client before it's amazing that it turned out as well as it did.
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Mar 21, 2016 07:28
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Keith Atherton posted:I was the UX designer for MSN Messenger 6 in 2003 or so. Since I'd never used an IM client before it's amazing that it turned out as well as it did.
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Mar 21, 2016 09:03
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I still have a 6 digit ICQ # that I check every year or so just to make sure it wasn't hacked the previous year by the Russians. The only messages I get are 12 digit "hotties" wanting to cyber... and b0n0r pillz. Seems legit. I know one of you have my ICQ pimp hand beat... 968***
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Mar 21, 2016 09:09
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drunk asian neighbor posted:I think I was using Pidgin in the last gasps of my IM days. Multi-client integration was pretty nice for the few international friends I had who used ICQ or MSN instead of AIM. I had an Xfire plugin for it back in the day, and have a Steam one now. Robnoxious posted:I still have a 6 digit ICQ # that I check every year or so just to make sure it wasn't hacked the previous year by the Russians. I had 56**** but it's not accepting my password, apparently I need to contact the support department because I can't use regular password recovery, I don't know if that spells doom for my account or what. [edit: I don't really care that much though!]
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Mar 21, 2016 10:18
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I recovered my ICQ the other day and every time i log into it now i just get a message from a 5 digit telling me i've been hacked and need to follow their link and i just close it and disconnect because whatever, it's been taken over by a russian company now and no one uses it anymore so why bother.
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Mar 21, 2016 11:10
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ISDN was god damned magical going from 56K. Going from 150 ms ping on a good day, to 20-25 ms for national CS servers. LPB, bitches.
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Mar 21, 2016 11:36
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neato burrito posted:Y'all motherfuckers never played a game loaded from a cassette tape on a regular antenna TV on a non-centering joystick with one button. Long live TRS-80. Speak for yourself. I played Phoenix on one of those.
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Mar 21, 2016 11:37
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Robnoxious posted:I still have a 6 digit ICQ # that I check every year or so just to make sure it wasn't hacked the previous year by the Russians. 5 digit what up. Can't remember it to save my life. I remember people selling the numbers on eBay.
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Mar 21, 2016 13:14
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JediTalentAgent posted:Anyone else have vague memories of I think K-mart offering a free/discounted internet service (Bluelight.com, I think)? It was that or another one that was heavily ad-supported to offset costs, and then users figured out how to kill the ads or something. The old lady who lives next door was still using a free Netzero account on a Win98 machine up until a couple of years ago. All she used it for was checking her email, but goddamn it's easy to forget how painfully slow dialup was even for things like that. At the same time that those free ISPs popped up, the dot-com boom also gave rise to companies like AllAdvantage that would pay you for running software which ran ad banners on the bottom of your screen. They tried to be clever and would stop tracking you if the mouse didn't move for a few minutes or the screen shut off, but naturally it didn't take long for all kinds of methods and software to cheat the system to appear. Initially my friend would tape one end of a rod to his mouse and the other end to an oscillating fan and run it all night. Later, software that randomly moved the mouse like trembler.exe appeared. While they tried to detect and stop it, it was easy to work around this since their heuristics kind of sucked. Then there was full-blown cheater software (I think it was called SoA?) that let you run multiple accounts and rack up quite a nice sum of money quickly. We actually made some money off of this service before a letter eventually arrived with the check which said something like "We can't prove anything so we are still paying you for the last month, but your account is now closed and you are banned from the service". Unsurprisingly, AllAdvantage went bust less than two years after starting. The_Franz has a new favorite as of 14:29 on Mar 21, 2016 |
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Mar 21, 2016 13:58
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The_Franz posted:AllAdvantage This was like a prototype bitcoin many years earlier, in that it cost way more in electricity to keep your computer running and showing ads than you could possibly get paid, but lots of very stupid people (or people stealing electricity) did it anyway.
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Mar 21, 2016 14:58
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The_Franz posted:Initially my friend would tape one end of a rod to his mouse and the other end to an oscillating fan and run it all night. This is a great mental picture
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Mar 21, 2016 15:10
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Keith Atherton posted:I was the UX designer for MSN Messenger 6 in 2003 or so. Since I'd never used an IM client before it's amazing that it turned out as well as it did. I'm not sure what that says about MS's judgment in who to put in charge of design for a project. Making an IM client? Let's pick a guy who's never used one! Not to impugn your work, sir
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Mar 21, 2016 15:10
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Hillary Clintons Thong posted:Ive gotten some good deals on travel to the bahamas from random faxes, seems legit. Lmao I literally JUST pulled one of these off the fax machine. I like leaving them on a random person's desk that I walk by on the way back to my office 
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Mar 21, 2016 15:50
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Anyone remember the early days of Mechanical Turk? They had some yellow pages company paying a quarter per thing to see if a business was in a set of images. People made greasemonkey scripts to load and finish them faster. The problem is that people were greedy little shits and didn't even do it right. They would just load a page and click the "it's not in any of these" radio button and hit submit. Whenever enough people did that, it would move the set of images further down the street until it was impossible to complete any of them because they had all moved past where the business was. It did lead to some racial comedy when at one point people kept getting one for an African restaurant and the set of pictures had moved down the street to a KFC. Eventually they shut that one down, because no one is going to pay someone a quarter for nothing. It was a shame because as a shiftless teenager, I did like doing those things properly and making 34 dollars. Once they took that down, mechanical turk was nothing but "Make a dollar by writing 5000 words about this car dealership" and I stopped going. Another similar thing was the Club Live thing that Microsoft made. You would play games to earn points and use the points in the store to get actual things. The games were simple but there were two that were exploitable. They involved typing words. One was about baseball I think, but the other was chicken themed. The chicken themed one basically gave you a set of letters and you had to make anagrams out of them. It gave you six letters and you had to make words 3-6 letters long with it. The thing was, there wasn't any kind of submit button after typing. You just type and when you get a word, it deletes the letters you just typed and puts the word on the board. So you could take the six letters, type it into an anagram solver and just type all the words that pop up as fast as you can. Then the bots came. You download the bot, switch to the game window, click each letter and it goes to down. Eventually the bots got better and they could click the letters themselves, then they could start the next game themselves. Then Microsoft added captchas to the game and the bots got past that. Then they added better captchas and the bots would just tell you to solve it to move on. Then Microsoft eventually shut the site down and refused a lot of prizes. The biggest prize was Windows Vista Ultimate for 6000 points. I bought a bunch of prizes on the store but Microsoft canceled a lot of people's orders. I ended up getting an Windows Live Messenger bag and Windows Vista Ultimate. Both of these were a total waste of time, but I enjoyed doing both of them. As I said, I was a shiftless teenager with nothing better to do. I think the downfall of both was fatwallet. Those shitlords will ruin any deal on the internet if it means they got the most 10% off coupons for deodorant.
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Mar 21, 2016 15:56
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IIRC a bunch of botters were doing things like submitting enough points for 3 Xbox 360s, i.e. greedy fatwallet assholes not realizing that MS would obviously not send out 3 Xbox360s to 1 person when it would take like a month of human input to earn enough points for 1 system. I might be wrong on the actual prize, but yeah, if you submit claims for 5 copies of Vista Ultimate, obviously you're gaming the system. The same type of people who buy 5 of a TV that's mispriced from $1000 to $100 and then rant and rage when Best Buy doesn't honor it (despite the fact that any online retailer worth a drat has wording in their ToS that says they don't have to honor those kinds of pricing errors).
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Mar 21, 2016 16:10
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Quote-Unquote posted:This was like a prototype bitcoin many years earlier, in that it cost way more in electricity to keep your computer running and showing ads than you could possibly get paid, but lots of very stupid people (or people stealing electricity) did it anyway. If you used it legitimately, yes, but I imagine that most legitimate users quit after a few weeks at most since it wasn't worth the time and the ad bar was annoying as hell. On the other hand, the cheater software would make a lot of money quickly by running multiple accounts at once, generating fake referrals, running the fake referral accounts, etc... Every somewhat technical person in school was easily making over $100 a month (in some cases much more) just by letting this software idle for a few hours. I would wager that most of the company's payouts after the first couple of months were going to people somehow cheating the system. They did eventually flag and ban everyone even somewhat suspicious, but that was only a couple of months before, in a completely unsurprising twist, the company went under. drunk asian neighbor posted:IIRC a bunch of botters were doing things like submitting enough points for 3 Xbox 360s, i.e. greedy fatwallet assholes not realizing that MS would obviously not send out 3 Xbox360s to 1 person when it would take like a month of human input to earn enough points for 1 system. I might be wrong on the actual prize, but yeah, if you submit claims for 5 copies of Vista Ultimate, obviously you're gaming the system. Speaking of scams involving the 360, back when it launched they had a giveaway in conjunction with Mountain Dew where the bottle caps had codes which were tickets that you could enter into raffles to get a 360 before launch day. You could enter as many codes as you had (up to a point) so the more disgusting soda you bought, the better your chances. They also had a site that let you enter your email address and send a code to yourself to fulfill the "no purchase necessary" part of the contest rules. This site did limit you to one code per email address, but they didn't filter out those sites that give you a one-time throwaway email address and had nothing like a capcha to stop bots. Naturally people wrote programs that generated a bunch of throwaway addresses, sent codes to them and then scraped and entered the codes into their account so they could dump the maximum number of entries into one raffle which practically guaranteed they they won. They did quickly catch on and shut this down, but not before giving away a lot of essentially free 360s. The_Franz has a new favorite as of 17:28 on Mar 21, 2016 |
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Mar 21, 2016 16:14
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Back in 2008-ish, Pepsi did a promotion of some sort where IIRC you entered codes from bottle caps to get stuff off a list of things on Amazon. Turns out the codes were not totally random or something, and people figured out how to generate them. An IRC friend sent me the link to a generator website and I racked up enough points to get a nice pair of Sennheiser headphones and a bunch of music CDs. Others got hundreds of dollars of poo poo but I heard some got letters later... I stayed less greedy and did OK. I think I also used some points to enter a drawing for a Zune, which I won and eventually had to give away because I didn't want it and nobody wanted to buy it, even for $30.
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Mar 21, 2016 22:37
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computer parts posted:They've gone away now, but a lot of the local places had fax food delivery ordering. Just print out a PDF, fill in your information, fax it to them, and wait 20 minutes. This is also how most people would "call in" to a radio show. You could fax in a song request or sometime it could be to enter a contest. If you listed to old Howard Stern or Bob and Tom shows you'll hear them say, "we just got a fax from a listener who says this to say...". Same thing when a talk show hosts says, "Bob emailed in and has this to say about Obama..."
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Mar 21, 2016 22:59
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Cojawfee posted:Club Live I got into this right before people starting botting it and everything went bonkers. Once people figured out that everything was client side, it was just a matter using Cheat Engine to lock the address that said "yup, you won" to "true" and only having to enter one word each time.  I gave out a dozen 360 controllers to friends who had 360s and returned some copies of Vista Ultimate to Walmart for store credit (I still can't believe this worked), which paid for all of my groceries for quite a while. The messenger bag was actually decent quality and worked great for transporting my Wii and a few games when I still moving around a lot.
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Mar 22, 2016 00:22
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I love my messenger bag and I've used it for years.
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Mar 22, 2016 00:27
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Buttcoin purse posted:When you sell someone one of these systems, you just know you're also going to be able to sell them 24 oxygen-free gold-plated Monster cables to go with it. 
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Mar 22, 2016 00:53
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I remember years ago Pepsi had some codes for make your own CDs of the kinda top hits of 2000. Including this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-IPcVaif3 Stocking up for a party I noticed the codes on there were sequential only in the last string so I was able to order up several for mates. BogDew has a new favorite as of 06:23 on Mar 22, 2016 |
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Mar 22, 2016 06:21
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I remember Pepsi doing a promotion in the early 2000s where there would be a code for a free download from iTunes. I actually did drink Pepsi from to time, and this was the only time period where I intentionally installed iTunes on a Windows computer. It only stayed installed long enough to download the songs and burn them to CD, after which I uninstalled that piece of crap posthaste.
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Mar 22, 2016 06:49
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Disposable digital cameras that you'd hack so you didn't have to go and exchange them/turn them in at the drug store to get your photos developed.
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Mar 22, 2016 07:40
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Data Graham posted:I'm not sure what that says about MS's judgment in who to put in charge of design for a project. Making an IM client? Let's pick a guy who's never used one! It was a different time. They take design much more seriously now. I worked at MS thru most of the 90s and then left and did contract work. The design manager for that part of MSN was a former coworker and trusted that I could figure things out and come up to speed. Ever hear of MSN Voice? Probably not because I worked on it for six months then they killed it. It was to be a service where you set up an account and it would route your incoming calls to go to your mobile phone, home phone, whatever, based on a set of conditions you would set. So you could set it so that calls to your home landline would go to your office or mobile phone during the day for instance. Amazing that was only 13 years ago.
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Mar 22, 2016 08:24
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JediTalentAgent posted:Disposable digital cameras that you'd hack so you didn't have to go and exchange them/turn them in at the drug store to get your photos developed. I still have 10 sealed disposable cameras in a box somewhere. Every now and then I find them and try to think of something artistic to do with them, but I come up blank each time.
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Mar 22, 2016 08:34
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I remember there was MSN Messenger which was for hip and cool people and had a ton of features, most of which were useless. Then there was Windows Messenger which was for deskjockey squares that nobody as far as I know ever used and had no features.
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Mar 22, 2016 08:36
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Mak0rz posted:I remember there was MSN Messenger which was for hip and cool people and had a ton of features, most of which were useless. Yeah the version of MSN Messenger I worked on was the first with user avatars and eye candy. For the younger demographic. Windows Messenger was the XP client meant for business purposes.
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Mar 22, 2016 08:51
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Keith Atherton posted:Yeah the version of MSN Messenger I worked on was the first with user avatars and eye candy. For the younger demographic. Wasn't MSN Messenger the first mainstream free IM to incorporate video chat when it fused their Netmeeting into it? I mean there was CU-CMe but you had to pay for that. MS buying Skype was one of their smartest acquirements or they'd still be fumbling around trying to get an IM. I also like how MS leaves the Skype division alone for the most part and let's them design and evolve organically.
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Mar 22, 2016 09:19
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Mannnnn MSN Messenger was so big with kids my age back in the 2000s. I used to stay in the same hotel every summer and all the kids would use MSN messenger to stay in touch. Good times...
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Mar 22, 2016 09:40
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Didnt microsoft have a chat app that attempted to make the conversation look like an illustrated cartoon or comic?
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Mar 22, 2016 11:09
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Which mod picked this bad title
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Mar 22, 2016 11:09
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