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Vibration and odd shapes are unlikely to be a problem for audio CDs that spin at the normal 1x speed, they only spin the disc at around 200 to 500 rpm. The fun starts when you stick it in a high speed 52x computer drive that is full of warnings about not loading cracked or misshapen discs because of the risk of explosion. The speed never increased above 52x because if you go much higher the plastic immediately disintegrates even with a perfectly round undamaged disc due to air resistance and resonance vibration https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zs7x1Hu29Wc&t=370s
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Aug 21, 2016 06:35
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Our school had a LaserDisc but it was pretty much relegated to running the Karaoke disc for days when it was too smoggy to play and we got Multipurpose Room time. Educational technology is always interesting to me. When I started Kinder they had juuuuust started to use the Macs to make awards and poo poo on DotMatrix printers, but still used the little film projectors with integrated cassette players for film strips. Then they got VCRs and the computer lab started out with APPLE II's. By the time I was gone it was at least 2 Macintosh Classics in the classrooms, laser printers, a networked system of laser printers and inkjets, digital cameras and poo poo. The place was pretty loaded up for a public school in 1995. Anyone remember these little apple keyboards with LCD screens that basically served as little word processors? You'd write up your paper and then hook it into a Mac and it would either let you print it out or transfer the document to The Writing Center or whatever. In High School it would resurface as the eMate. God I loved that piece of poo poo. Backlit screen, FaxModem, stylus input with handwriting recognition. It was a bitch to get files off of it and print, but drat if it wasn't a great babby's first laptop
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Aug 21, 2016 07:10
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FilthyImp posted:.... for days when it was too smoggy to play Yikes. Where was this?
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Aug 21, 2016 07:13
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FilthyImp posted:
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Aug 21, 2016 07:14
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Yeah we had a LaserDisc at our school too. The only disc I have ever seen on it was this one full of chemistry lab demonstrations. Since this was the dark days after lab safety standards but before YouTube it was the only way we could see gummi bears reacting violently with potassium chlorate or a small pile of nitrogen triiodide exploding after a feather lands on it, so it became the chemistry teacher's favorite toy and pretty much only he used it. It owned. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6_UONDmi28
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Aug 21, 2016 07:26
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FilthyImp posted:Our school had a LaserDisc but it was pretty much relegated to running the Karaoke disc for days when it was too smoggy to play and we got Multipurpose Room time. Yeah, I started out with APPLE II's, with a variety of typing tutors and educational software. We had "typing skills" classes from elementary to high school, I had already learned how to type on my own and those classes were kind of redundant. By the time I got to high school I was clearly too advanced for the class and the teacher just let me do whatever I wanted, so I would download games from Home of the Underdogs and mess around with that poo poo during the period. Unfortunately, after columbine we were no longer allowed to play any games, was a shame. We also had a few Macs when I was in elementary school, we couldn't access the actual system but some sort of shell called "Finder", which had a list of approved programs you were allowed to use, needless to say none of them much fun (although we were able to entertain ourselves with the speech to voice features in some word processing software). If you wanted to get into the real Mac, you had to exit Finder, which required a password. Somehow we figured out that if you just kept hitting keys you would eventually just exit Finder anyway, kind of interesting how we were able to find a bug like that. It wasn't really that interesting, other than being able to play the picture puzzle games, but one day we put Finder in the trashcan to see what would happen. The computer never worked again and somehow no one ever figured out it was our fault.
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Aug 21, 2016 07:52
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Dick Trauma posted:Those Jerrold boxes will never die. In 2000 Adelphia cable gave me one that immediately went into a drawer since my TV was cable ready. About two years ago when I finally switched to digital cable I dug it out and handed it over to Time Warner who had long since purchased Adelphia and the rep looked at it with a mix of confusion and wonder. My overriding memory of this cable box was the mute button on the remote control, which muted the cable box, not the TV. Lost count of how many times someone set the VCR to record something and got a silent recording with "MUTE" burned into the corner in yellow letters.
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Aug 21, 2016 14:19
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I got the demo for Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed out of a cereal box in mini-disc form. So did many drivers for network cards. What a waste of manufacturing, I can't imagine it would have been cheaper to pay for a specific run of mini-discs
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Aug 21, 2016 14:24
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Cojawfee posted:What game was it? 
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Aug 21, 2016 14:27
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Original_Z posted:We also had a few Macs when I was in elementary school, we couldn't access the actual system but some sort of shell called "Finder", which had a list of approved programs you were allowed to use, needless to say none of them much fun (although we were able to entertain ourselves with the speech to voice features in some word processing software). If you wanted to get into the real Mac, you had to exit Finder, which required a password. Somehow we figured out that if you just kept hitting keys you would eventually just exit Finder anyway, kind of interesting how we were able to find a bug like that. It wasn't really that interesting, other than being able to play the picture puzzle games, but one day we put Finder in the trashcan to see what would happen. The computer never worked again and somehow no one ever figured out it was our fault. Our school had a room full of Windows 2000 machines, and for whatever reason no one thought of setting a password for them. So I changed the password on one computer, and then the entire network was stuck at the login screen. We didn't have class for weeks because the tech guy had to reformat all the drives. EugeneJ has a new favorite as of 14:46 on Aug 21, 2016 |
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Aug 21, 2016 14:43
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when flash drives were still hella expensive, or at least uselessly small and expensive (back when a gig was like $50) i bought a bunch of CD-RW for really cheap to use cause idk i was in high school. you can do an open session burn and just basically use a rewritable disc as a flash drive with 700mb of capacity, pretty cool especially when your 128mb flash drive is ~serious business~ the school computers all had really fancy disc drives, way fancier than the one i had in my computer. they could BURN DVDS!!! and they had LIGHT SCRIBE!! and a bunch of other symbols on the disc drive that i didn't know what they did. except they locked out the disc burn functionality at an administrator level, nobody could burn discs. not even teachers. i mean i guess they bought prebuilts in bulk but god those drives must have cost a fuckload back in like 2001 when they bought them it wouldn't have changed anything if none of the computers had drives and probably saved thousands not as dumb as smart boards though, a multi thousand dollar thing installed in every single public school classroom from like sixth grade up until i graduated high school and not a single teacher ever used it for more than navigating power points nigga crab pollock has a new favorite as of 14:59 on Aug 21, 2016 |
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Aug 21, 2016 14:55
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oh man now im remembering how each projector/computer had a VGA splitter/repeater/thing hooked up to a thirty foot long vga cable that connected to the projector. thirty feet. a massive basketball sized loop of vga cable hanging on the back of every computer or projector because they were a few feet from one another.
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Aug 21, 2016 15:08
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Original_Z posted:We also had a few Macs when I was in elementary school, we couldn't access the actual system but some sort of shell called "Finder", which had a list of approved programs you were allowed to use, needless to say none of them much fun (although we were able to entertain ourselves with the speech to voice features in some word processing software). If you wanted to get into the real Mac, you had to exit Finder, which required a password. Somehow we figured out that if you just kept hitting keys you would eventually just exit Finder anyway, kind of interesting how we were able to find a bug like that. It wasn't really that interesting, other than being able to play the picture puzzle games, but one day we put Finder in the trashcan to see what would happen. The computer never worked again and somehow no one ever figured out it was our fault. Finder is the regular file browser on Macs, it sounds like you're talking about At Ease, a bundled add-on interface that restricted what users could do with the system 
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Aug 21, 2016 15:11
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At first I thought it was a joke about how you could barely do anything on old Macs
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Aug 21, 2016 15:12
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Aug 21, 2016 15:13
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BattleMaster posted:At first I thought it was a joke about how you could barely do anything on old Macs I remember the Macs at our school had parental filters on Netscape, but if you dug into the hard drive directory there was an old version of Internet Explorer you could launch without any restrictions I actually got yelled at for looking at FARK in the library
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Aug 21, 2016 15:15
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Lightscribe was underappreciated. Yeah it was only grey and darker grey and had a contrast ratio of like maybe 5:1 but the competition is a sharpie.
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Aug 21, 2016 15:15
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nigga crab pollock posted:except they locked out the disc burn functionality at an administrator level, nobody could burn discs. not even teachers. i mean i guess they bought prebuilts in bulk but god those drives must have cost a fuckload back in like 2001 when they bought them it wouldn't have changed anything if none of the computers had drives and probably saved thousands nigga crab pollock posted:oh man now im remembering how each projector/computer had a VGA splitter/repeater/thing hooked up to a thirty foot long vga cable that connected to the projector. thirty feet. I used to be a computer janitor for a school district. I remember one time we asked Gateway (yeah they were dumb enough to go with Gateway for computers, right up until MPC/Gateway imploded) if we could get bulk packaging so that we didn't have to throw away hundreds of loving driver CDs and manuals we were never going to use. Turned out, we could, but it would be an extra surcharge per unit. As far as we could tell, they basically would have packed up the computers per usual, then sent them to some third party to unpack and repack into the bulk packaging, then send it on to us. The charge per unit was only a few bucks short of what it would have cost to have them just send people out to do white-glove installation of the workstations, so we said "gently caress that we'll just keep hiring local kids during the summer". Piling up cardboard boxes and jumping into them can be pretty fun  But, who knows, maybe the sales reps that visited your district's IT department took 'em somewhere nice. Same district also loved SMART boards, and yeah most teachers didn't do much with them beyond Powerpoint - there were a handful who really dove in and learned the software and utilized it, mostly math teachers I think. One year they did ceiling mount installations for the projectors, and ran conduit for the VGA cable, but neglected to actually put the VGA cable in the conduit... so I got stuck with trying to pull VGA cables through conduit. Do you have any idea what a pain in the rear end it is to try and pull that big blocky square VGA plug around a 90 degree turn?
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Aug 21, 2016 15:34
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Light scribe was cool but not really worth it. Especially when you have to hope that both the disc and light scribe burns went off without a hitch. Not to mention how much time it took. The first time I tried light scribe, it hosed up and burned the entire image into a small ring in the center of the disc.
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Aug 21, 2016 15:43
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i remember there were composite ports in the walls for the ceiling mounts, which was pretty lol considering the only time i ever saw em get used was game consoles for non educational purposes they just had their desks under the projector and the vga/power cords hung down. lmao
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Aug 21, 2016 15:49
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the composite ports were probably intended for VCR/DVD machines
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Aug 21, 2016 15:59
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:the composite ports were probably intended for VCR/DVD machines That's how mine is set up. In fact, there is a DVD/VCR combo with another VCR on top of it because the VCR portion of the one on the bottom eats tapes and when it did work, it rewound at a glacial pace. I don't really use it now that they unblocked YouTube (yes, they really had it blocked for teachers lol). The library still has a big collection of VHS tapes and DVDs, but gently caress rewinding tapes. Plus, most of the tapes have been played so much over the years they're washed out, audio cuts in/out, etc.
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Aug 21, 2016 16:28
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error1 posted:Finder is the regular file browser on Macs, it sounds like you're talking about At Ease, a bundled add-on interface that restricted what users could do with the system Until you use one weird trick with HyperCard to shut it down / bypass it The day I learned that was a good day indeed, gently caress you At Ease
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Aug 21, 2016 22:54
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Wasn't there a competitor to lightscribe that could label a regular blank cd by burning garbage data to spell out your text on the outer edge of the data side? Or did I make that up?
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Aug 21, 2016 23:09
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Nah, I think I read something about that too, although I don't think it caught on for poo poo. IIRC, it stole a ton of disc space because it wrote on the outside edge of the disc and that's where most of the data is - like a 1/2' wide strip of letters took the equivalent of 200 meg of data. Fake edit: it was called 'DiscT@2' or some dumbasss name like that and Sony was behind it.
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Aug 21, 2016 23:56
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error1 posted:Vibration and odd shapes are unlikely to be a problem for audio CDs that spin at the normal 1x speed, they only spin the disc at around 200 to 500 rpm. i had my Diablo 2 CD explode like that inside my pc shortly after getting the game and i almost had a mental breakdown over it
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Aug 22, 2016 00:53
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How much faster (in KB/s or whatever) is the read speed of 52x over, say, 48x or 32x? What is the risk of catastrophic failure at those spin speeds? Has that ever been quantified? I'd be interested in knowing whether the increase in read speed is even worth the risk. Thankfully none of my drives have caused anything to explode, but I once saved my roommate's Xbox from Resident Evil 5 shrapnel by exchanging it once I saw tiny fractures in the inner ring.
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Aug 22, 2016 01:00
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Mariana Horchata posted:i had my Diablo 2 CD explode like that inside my pc shortly after getting the game and i almost had a mental breakdown over it The problem on some was the silkscreen. If you didn't print on all of the disc, it would change the center of mass and it would cause the disk to vibrate.
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Aug 22, 2016 01:09
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Lightscribe sounded cool when it came out. In practice it was pretty sad though. I had never heard of a disc actually exploding in the drive before. I once trolled some kid on another forum because he claimed he was afraid of it happening and wanted a no-cd crack. It devolved into him having a meltdown in leetspeak. Casimir Radon has a new favorite as of 01:13 on Aug 22, 2016 |
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Aug 22, 2016 01:10
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Mak0rz posted:How much faster (in KB/s or whatever) is the read speed of 52x over, say, 48x or 32x? What is the risk of catastrophic failure at those spin speeds? Has that ever been quantified? The __x factor for CD-ROMs was 150K/sec. In other words, a 1X CD-ROM drive would play back at 150KB/s. Each X is a multiplier, so the data speed that higher speed drives were capable of was significant. However, I seem to remember about the time 52x drives came on the scene-- and the reports of them blowing up discs was almost immediately after they came out-- Someone had figured out that 48x was the fastest, "safe" speed for CD-ROMs, based on the average ability of a computer to keep up with the transfer speed, and the media itself remaining intact and reading reliably at that speed. I remember a few cd-rom drives originally sold as 52x had firmware updates available that limited the 52x read speed to the outer edges of the disc (where the rotational speed would be lower to achieve the 52x read speed) to prevent the drive from spinning up too fast. I never had one actually explode for me, but I had quite a few I was scared of. Some weirdly deformed CDs I had caused some frightening drive noise and vibrations occasionally, too. I'm really glad that optical drives are on the way out. Less moving parts is always a plus in my book.
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Aug 22, 2016 01:25
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How come they never made drives that had two or more read heads for extreme buffering?
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Aug 22, 2016 01:30
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Casimir Radon posted:How come they never made drives that had two or more read heads for extreme buffering? Now I'm imagining a drive with a single line of like 15 lasers that don't move and just stay still as the disc rotates above them. That's probably overkill but I dunno I'm not a computery science man
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Aug 22, 2016 01:35
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Casimir Radon posted:How come they never made drives that had two or more read heads for extreme buffering? They did - those Kenwood "72x" drives made in the late 90's had either multiple heads or split the laser with mirrors(I can't remember which) to read multiple lines of data simultaneously. Problem was, this was an era of weird CD copy-protection that involved bad sectors - if the install didn't throw an error, the disc was a copy and the install would fail. This sort of copy protection would give the drives fits and led to them being removed from the market.
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Aug 22, 2016 01:44
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I used to do a lot of computer janiteering for little companies in my hilarious flyover state. My favorite thing was to find the person with the correct ratio of authority to technical knowledge, i.e., a lot of the former, very little of the latter. Once I had their ear I'd get the okay to do a companywide tech census which was great for two reasons: making stuff disappear and laughing at the weird old garbage they had bought over the years to bridge the various gaps of technology that have developed since the 1970s. loving around with adapter chains, getting ancient mothballed systems working and running weird old games, trying to figure out just what the gently caress whatever the hell this thing is... What I'm saying is it makes sense that the economy collapses every once in a while because you need idiots like me who are willing to jerk off in a closet until they're needed to fix legacy garbage for whatever hotfix
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Aug 22, 2016 02:42
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Cojawfee posted:Light scribe was cool but not really worth it. Especially when you have to hope that both the disc and light scribe burns went off without a hitch. Not to mention how much time it took. The first time I tried light scribe, it hosed up and burned the entire image into a small ring in the center of the disc. I used Lightscribe for a little while. Never had problems with Lightscribe screwing up a disc. But yeah.....the amount of time it took to burn and label the discs hardly made it worth the time, effort, and extra cost of the actual discs. Almost always had to run the Lightscribe process twice to make the image dark enough to even see. Cool technology.....but not quite worth it.
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Aug 22, 2016 04:00
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I could see using it in, say, a well-funded research setting contemporary to its release but I agree it has very limited consumer use
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Aug 22, 2016 04:09
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I've heard of retrobright for fixing up yellowed plastic cases, but are there any good ways to fix cables where the soft plastic has gone oily/sticky?
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Aug 22, 2016 06:22
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JnnyThndrs posted:They did - those Kenwood "72x" drives made in the late 90's had either multiple heads or split the laser with mirrors(I can't remember which) to read multiple lines of data simultaneously. They were also unreliable as poo poo. When they worked it was pretty cool though
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Aug 22, 2016 06:29
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dookifex_maximus posted:I used to do a lot of computer janiteering for little companies in my hilarious flyover state. My favorite thing was to find the person with the correct ratio of authority to technical knowledge, i.e., a lot of the former, very little of the latter. Once I had their ear I'd get the okay to do a companywide tech census which was great for two reasons: making stuff disappear and laughing at the weird old garbage they had bought over the years to bridge the various gaps of technology that have developed since the 1970s. loving around with adapter chains, getting ancient mothballed systems working and running weird old games, trying to figure out just what the gently caress whatever the hell this thing is... Your story went from interesting to creepy and weird really fast.
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Aug 22, 2016 10:43
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Samuel L. ACKSYN posted:They were also unreliable as poo poo. Yeah, I bought one as they were closing them out and I think it worked properly for a couple months, then got progressively screwier. Pretty much the same story that everybody tells. :/
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Aug 22, 2016 11:38
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