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Data Graham posted:My teachers always called it "running off". "I've got to go run off some copies of today's assignment" holy poo poo
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Aug 17, 2016 04:15
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I was in Elementary from about 89-95 and the purple ditto sheets were in use until about 4th grade or so. Afterwards it was a shift to Xerox copies or Mimeographed copies. That school also had a rad intranet based off of AppleTalk or something. Blew my mind that the Gifted nerd Social Studies class was run off of a machine in the Textbook Room, that accessed the Social Science/Encarta CD-ROM that was in one of the main computers in the primary Computer Lab like a building away. loving Star Trek poo poo, that was. Then by the time I was in 6th grade there were greyscale QuickCams for the Macs and the school owned a Digital Camera that took pictures to a floppy.
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Aug 17, 2016 05:01
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Smoke posted:Also something I've noticed going away: People ordering their channels on TV to their liking. A lot of them just stick with the default order and memorize the channels or use the digital TV guide instead. I don't want to spend time learning how to customize stuff like that, and then actually doing the work, when Sony make lovely TVs that only last a few years and don't make spare parts so I'm going to end up with a brand new TV with a brand new user interface in no time at all. They don't make things like they used to  SPECIAL DVD BONUS CONTENT:  This is Office 95 running on Windows 98 SE, I'm playing around with running this under Bochs since I used Qemu for Windows 98 SE last time but it tends to often hang when rebooting. I forgot how Office 95 gave its apps special titlebars - the gradient effect isn't a standard Windows thing at this point in time (Notepad doesn't have it) and they even used different fonts in there to make it look more fancy  This reminds me of how Microsoft has always been annoying, though - there's the special Office Toolbar on the right, in the Start Menu they put all their apps in the top level instead of in a folder like everyone else (seriously what a bunch of jerks) and I had to make sure to not install that Find Fast crap and disable the Office Fast Start feature. At least I guess this version of Word was pre-Clippy so they just have that extra toolbar to show me a tip. The only problem I've found so far in Bochs (after a bit of difficulty getting devices working, but I found some help online for that) is that fancy mouse cursors make it so slow it becomes unusable, so I can't have the dinosaur cursors  What else should I do to see if running under Bochs is a winner? I noticed this in the configuration file: pre:#======================================================================= # VOODOO: # This defines the Voodoo Graphics emulation (experimental). Currently # supported models are 'voodoo1' and 'voodoo2'. The Voodoo2 support is # not yet complete. # # Examples: # voodoo: enabled=1, model=voodoo1 #======================================================================= #voodoo: enabled=1, model=voodoo1 
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Aug 17, 2016 08:25
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drat I remember those ditto machines back in elementary in the mid-nineties. Everybody called them mimeographs though they clearly weren't. School was too broke to afford a photocopier I guess. All that old-rear end TV talk made me go look for my first TV set that I had at home until I was 13:  National Panacolor. No RC, I had to actually get my rear end up to change the channel and poo poo in the twilight years of the twentieth century, believe it or not. Got to watch the 9/11 attacks live on it. Worked like a charm until my cat pissed all over it somehow. Of course, most of the time there was some Jerrold cable box. One example: 
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Aug 17, 2016 10:27
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I love how that's as dark as "black" ever got on those things. Yet it somehow seemed okay when it was on.
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Aug 17, 2016 11:18
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We had one of these when I was a kid up til about when my parents divorced.  I remember it being a literal pain in the dick to move. We also usually had one of these on top of it :  We usually had a Zenith or Scientific Atlanta box wherever we moved.
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Aug 17, 2016 12:11
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Negrostrike posted:
Wow! My grandparents had that exact same TV. The door or the right was busted off though thanks to me jumping around like an idiot doing Ninja Turtles moves.
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Aug 17, 2016 12:54
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gently caress though if those console tvs wouldn't break your drat toe if you stubbed it. They were monsters!
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Aug 17, 2016 14:41
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Skoll posted:We had one of these when I was a kid up til about when my parents divorced. I still find it amazing that things like TVs and record players went through a period where they could be considered as furniture 
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Aug 17, 2016 16:52
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Hooking up a Pong console to the back of our tiny Sony B&W seemed pretty drat futuristic back in 1976. I'm sure the landfills of the 1980s are peppered with heaps of these things.
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Aug 17, 2016 17:12
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The earliest cable box I recall had an analog dial in the middle. There was the in-between channel hack for a bit but what I also recall was sticking a piece of thick plastic, like 1" wide, into the top edge of the box between the front panel and the case and moving it back and forth until you hit a sweet spot to get free HBO. Probably in combination with moving the dial to a certain position. How that could even do anything is beyond me but I recall that very specifically. Early 80s timeframe. E: seems like this came up earlier in the thread I think my schools called those purple dittos memographs also. The thing I remember about them is that had a very specific smell. Dick Trauma posted:Hooking up a Pong console to the back of our tiny Sony B&W seemed pretty drat futuristic back in 1976. I'm sure the landfills of the 1980s are peppered with heaps of these things.
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Aug 17, 2016 17:27
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thetzar posted:Sorry to interrupt Cable Box Chat, but does anyone else remember dittos? When I was in elementary school, xeroxes were still hella expensive, so we got our handouts and worksheets done via spirit duplicators ("dittos"), in purple ink that smudged onto your hands if you weren't careful. Fast Times at Ridgemont High https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uu3iCvAQCHg We had them in my school until about 1985 or so.
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Aug 17, 2016 17:34
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Negrostrike posted:drat I remember those ditto machines back in elementary in the mid-nineties. Everybody called them mimeographs though they clearly weren't. School was too broke to afford a photocopier I guess. The big reason why dittos were around for longer than we think they should have been was that they were low-tech and cheap. Schools are really not very likely to just toss a fax/computer/copy machine until they really, really need to and it's likely that the faculty was very well versed on how to use the machine. That goes for the mimeo as well, since the earlier models were hand-cranked. The later models that were semi-automated to look like a Xerox and really beasts at producing B&W one-page copies. I had one of those at work for a while and it was really, really satisfying to get 100 copies in like 2 minutes, all the while the thing was going zweeee----CHUNK CHUNK CHUNK CHUNK CHUNK as it pitched the completed copies out.
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Aug 17, 2016 17:42
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Mak0rz posted:I still find it amazing that things like TVs and record players went through a period where they could be considered as furniture It was part of the century-long cultural relationship we had with developing technology. A friend of mine liked to talk about how in the 50s, we all collectively got the idea that technology (which we didn't all trust implicitly yet) should be an invisible and hidden and non-threatening part of our lives, so things like TVs were treated like furniture and designed as such, with all the ugly details hidden away behind wood panels. Then later, in the 70s, technology started becoming fetishized and desirable in its own right, so we started wanting our tech to look like test equipment. That's when you started getting stereo gear with shiny steel cases and lots of exposed controls and such. Then in the 90s it all became commoditized and we got a decade of dull gray boxes that we wanted to be unobtrusive because it was tedious and boring infrastructure.
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Aug 17, 2016 17:49
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Data Graham posted:Then in the 90s it all became commoditized and we got a decade of dull gray boxes that we wanted to be unobtrusive because it was tedious and boring infrastructure. 
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Aug 17, 2016 17:56
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I remember we had a slapdash computer lab at the quasi-trade school I enrolled in for extra credit in high school, part of our job as students was to rehabilitate these old 286 or 386's, in some cases putting GEOWorks on them since it was the only thing that could run (or maybe it was licensing), and these were going right back into classrooms, to do...something? One of our machines was capable of running Doom II, and we'd crowd around it and take turns playing. It was so immersive for the time, I had dreams about running through fuzzily defined and haunted corridors, even though I had maybe played 20 minutes of it total. Mostly, we'd play Apogee demo games and a DOS port of Mortal Kombat, a cracked copy of Stunts which you could glitch the physics at a certain speed to hit a wall and go flying off into the stratosphere, and my personal favorite, Scorched Earth: The Mother of All Games. We also had a Mac Performa, which really stood out from the crowd with its sharp screen, elegant design, and beautiful interface. It also had very few games and was pretty underpowered. It sat in the corner until someone wanted to play the demo of Marathon or Maelstrom again. It seems like every UI design since after OS 8 has tried to avoid any kind of sharp edges, and it's a drat shame because it looks so clean.
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Aug 17, 2016 18:16
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Is it only me who prefers "dull gray boxes" than the abomination that iMac G3 is? I'd rather have Frog Design and early Johnathan Ive stuff. Humphreys posted:Wow! My grandparents had that exact same TV. The door or the right was busted off though thanks to me jumping around like an idiot doing Ninja Turtles moves. Yeah, that little door was fragile as gently caress. Of course I broke it as well. Negostrike has a new favorite as of 18:54 on Aug 17, 2016 |
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Aug 17, 2016 18:50
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There was a time where Cablevision sent out un-scrambled, but carrying an encoded signal that basically told the box "Unless this flag is set, block the user from viewing this". It usually took about a second for the signal to come in and get decoded, so you could flip back and forth between channels and watch PPV programs a second at a time. I remember being able to listen to Wrestlemania and new movies (and porn, before they started muting that during the day) However, we figured out that the cable box is very low-powered and can only do one task at a time, and by pressing ALT and then Channel Up, it goes out and queries the cable home office to see if it's entitled to any PPV programs. So by unplugging the cable, switching to the PPV channel (getting static), then spamming the ALT-ChannelUp command, you could keep the box from processing the PPV "kill" signal, meaning free PPV for as long as you kept pressing that button every few seconds. ... which lead to me learning about 555 timers, relays, and electronics in general. "Yeah, it's a device that automatically flips through channels for you!" Oh, and adding to TV chat, my own personal hell is a person with a 4:3 powerpoint, which is all stretched out after it was pasted into a 16:9 template, hooked into an HDMI-ready projector by way of a VGA adapter. They really go out of their way to make sure their presentation looks as lovely as possible by the time it reaches the screen. an AOL chatroom has a new favorite as of 19:01 on Aug 17, 2016 |
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Aug 17, 2016 18:58
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Negrostrike posted:Is it only me who prefers "dull gray boxes" than the abomination that iMac G3 is? I'd rather have Frog Design and early Johnathan Ive stuff. I don't really care for the iMac myself, but the market they were aiming for was not you or I, and they probably hit it square on the nose. I remember seeing the silly thing for the first time, and I was kinda split. It looked clean, solid, and modern, and very self contained. I had a gray monitor that didn't match my gray box of fans, or my gray keyboard, or my black speakers... It also looked impossible to upgrade or work on, a 25 pound disposable computer: once it gets slow, you're gonna toss it and get a new one that will once again evoke that clean, solid, modern feeling. A fine model for the electronics of today. Back to PCs, though, once the dominant color became "what the gently caress were we thinking, let's make everything black," then, "let's quiet everything down," PCs got a whole hell of a lot better aesthetically. doctorfrog has a new favorite as of 19:23 on Aug 17, 2016 |
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Aug 17, 2016 19:20
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the biggest issue with the imac and emac was that the cooling was mostly done through large holes in the top.. that collected dust.. eventually the dust would pile up on the inside, and cause the monitor to die under the right conditions.
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Aug 17, 2016 19:38
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doctorfrog posted:I remember we had a slapdash computer lab at the quasi-trade school I enrolled in for extra credit in high school, part of our job as students was to rehabilitate these old 286 or 386's, in some cases putting GEOWorks on them since it was the only thing that could run (or maybe it was licensing), and these were going right back into classrooms, to do...something? And yet rounded corners on rectangles were something from way back in the beginning, something that Steve wanted in the Mac ever since he found out it was possible: quote:Bill fired up his demo and it quickly filled the Lisa screen with randomly-sized ovals, faster than you thought was possible. But something was bothering Steve Jobs. "Well, circles and ovals are good, but how about drawing rectangles with rounded corners? Can we do that now, too?" http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.txt (I worked on that same block of De Anza Blvd for several years, about 20 years after this took place. It was always fun to look at the buildings and the street signs and that Texaco on the corner that gave Texaco Towers their name and imagine them inspiring this conversation)
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Aug 17, 2016 19:46
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Crazy to think that one day Apple would own a patent on rounded rectangles.
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Aug 17, 2016 20:34
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My high school bought an assload of these when they came out, and along with the hockey puck mouse pretty much made every student who wasn't already into computers hate them. Also tons of kids kept on stealing the mice, which made our school IT people get super upset. I remember they had some way of monitoring screens and sending messages to both individual and groups of computers, and more than once our whole classroom would get hit with "computer 11 is looking at inappropriate material" (it was Maddox, lol, hooray for being 14) or "stop looking at guitar websites during school hours". A couple kids got in serious trouble for going in and changing their/the entire classes grades, but considering some teachers used junk like their middle name/kids name for passwords of course some students were going to figure that out. In elementary school we had some old-rear end macs with that mystery school game where you played the detective trying to hunt down robots or something and zap them and answer questions (fake edit: Midnight Rescue!) and Oregon Trail, but I had Designosaurus and Wolfenstein 3D and Duke Nukem 1&2 (full versions baby!) at home so I got to experience real gaming. Actually I'm pretty sure those along with Jazz Jackrabbit, Epic Pinball, F15 Strike Eagle 2, Moraff's World+dungeon, Bye Bye Boris and Rogue meant I spent way too much time in front of a computer. E: not rogue, but it was very similar with ascii characters and you were a little smiley face guy IIRC, gently caress I'm gonna go crazy trying to remember this.
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Aug 17, 2016 20:35
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The Gasmask posted:My high school bought an assload of these when they came out, and along with the hockey puck mouse pretty much made every student who wasn't already into computers hate them. Also tons of kids kept on stealing the mice, which made our school IT people get super upset. Whatever they did to do those messages is probably the same way kids in my high school would get Goatse to display on every monitor in the building. Good times.
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Aug 17, 2016 20:36
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drunk asian neighbor posted:Whatever they did to do those messages is probably the same way kids in my high school would get Goatse to display on every monitor in the building. Good times. Ahaha I'm sure if goatse was a thing/well known then it would've happened. Actually maybe it was? I'm afraid to google search when goatse hit the web, don't need to stare into that gaping abyss again
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Aug 17, 2016 20:38
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Was elastomania big in the americas around 2004? I swear it was my schools version of doom.
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Aug 17, 2016 20:41
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Nierbo posted:Was elastomania big in the americas around 2004? I swear it was my schools version of doom. For me the "game that's installed on literally every PC in the school" was Liero
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Aug 17, 2016 20:47
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drunk asian neighbor posted:Whatever they did to do those messages is probably the same way kids in my high school would get Goatse to display on every monitor in the building. Good times. Probably some form of "netsend", we got a kid suspended for a day because we sent him a message "this is tech support, please leave your class immediately and bring us your laptop"
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Aug 17, 2016 20:55
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Data Graham posted:And yet rounded corners on rectangles were something from way back in the beginning, something that Steve wanted in the Mac ever since he found out it was possible:  Kind of hilarious to think of Jobs gnashing his teeth at all those 90 degree pixel turns on display, determined to stamp them all out.
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Aug 17, 2016 21:08
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drunk asian neighbor posted:For me the "game that's installed on literally every PC in the school" was Liero  holy poo poo I forgot about Liero, I played the hell out of that! Didn't it have some way to load in your own bitmaps as levels?
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Aug 17, 2016 21:10
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doctorfrog posted:Oh definitely, I'm not saying rounded corners weren't present at all. But in terms of sharpness and a lack of shyness about corners, I'm talking about what's on display here: Oh yessss MacOS was looking good until Rhapsody. Then come MacOS X release and everything went round and smooth, gradients everywhere and ew ew ew. Not sure how much Jobs interfered with GUI design, but NeXTSTEP was pretty square and all.  And drat it looks sexy to me. Oh mama hubba hubba. 
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Aug 17, 2016 21:48
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Negrostrike posted:Is it only me who prefers "dull gray boxes" than the abomination that iMac G3 is? I'd rather have Frog Design and early Johnathan Ive stuff. Hey, it could be worse. 
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Aug 17, 2016 21:54
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That thing was so cool if you wanted your reception area/lobby to scream "I, ROBOT"
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Aug 17, 2016 22:11
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Tubesock Holocaust posted:Hey, it could be worse. Biggest pain in the rear end to service of any machine I have ever worked on. No machine has made me literally bleed as often as the goddamn iLamps.
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Aug 17, 2016 22:18
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It did give us the Mac-Hats photoshop thread many years ago.
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Aug 17, 2016 22:24
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Bar none my favorite computer as a user was the 20" gooseneck iMac. I could get the LCD into the perfect position for comfort, almost like reading a magazine when I tilted my chair back.
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Aug 17, 2016 22:26
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RIP MadTV
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Aug 17, 2016 22:27
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Dick Trauma posted:Bar none my favorite computer as a user was the 20" gooseneck iMac. I could get the LCD into the perfect position for comfort, almost like reading a magazine when I tilted my chair back. You are now my enemy.
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Aug 17, 2016 22:28
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Dick Trauma posted:Bar none my favorite computer as a user was the 20" gooseneck iMac. I could get the LCD into the perfect position for comfort, almost like reading a magazine when I tilted my chair back. I did have a first-gen 15-incher to develop on for a while. Such a painfully small screen (I hadn't had such a small one since my 386!), but it was so neat that you could have this cute little glass-rimmed screen floating in front of you in space and see nothing of the actual computer, and move it around to whatever angle or swing it side to side (I never actually did this after about the first week).
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Aug 17, 2016 22:29
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CaptainSarcastic posted:You are now my enemy. Also (just like a goose) that neck made for easy carrying. But don't open the CD tray or the aesthetics go right out the window.
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Aug 17, 2016 22:29
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