|
I wonder if he's reading this thread... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKCFDBPvJ74
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2017 16:52
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 21, 2024 16:23 |
|
|
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-6d6X4E-3w
|
|
#
?
Apr 8, 2017 10:53
|
|
|
A nice recent tour of the PDP-1 including Space Wars and the Optic Fibre Pen:Zenostein posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EWQYAfuMYw Humphreys has a new favorite as of 13:52 on May 5, 2017 |
|
#
?
May 5, 2017 13:50
|
|
|
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szdbKz5CyhA
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2017 14:48
|
|
|
Before my gf got me an iPod Mini (a 4GB brick) I was a huge minidisc fan, the only one I knew of. It's really the only dead tech that I have that I can just fire up and have it work properly without any effort on my part. And I kinda miss it. Which is just further evidence that I'm "an old," as the kids say these days. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU3BceoMuaA In obsolete word processor news: I ran into a snag with the Neo2 I picked up on Amazon. I filled it up with text and may have hit a bad spot of memory, because I was greeted with some scary corruption messages that I couldn't get rid of without wiping the drat thing. Fortunately I had most of it saved to text files. I lost around an hour of writing. In the process of fixing the device, I found a slightly newer version of the US modules and updated it. I kinda feel like filling it up with text again to see how trustworthy the device is, but that's quite a bit of work. You can only transfer 8 text files at a time to the 8 hardkey-accessible file locations. doctorfrog has a new favorite as of 06:50 on May 29, 2017 |
|
#
?
May 29, 2017 06:46
|
|
|
doctorfrog posted:Before my gf got me an iPod Mini (a 4GB brick) I was a huge minidisc fan, the only one I knew of. It's really the only dead tech that I have that I can just fire up and have it work properly without any effort on my part. And I kinda miss it. Which is just further evidence that I'm "an old," as the kids say these days. For those playing at home, this is what the AlphaSmart Neo2 is:  https://jennifermack.net/2015/01/29/writing-with-the-alphasmart-neo2/
|
|
#
?
May 29, 2017 08:49
|
|
|
Despite having used computers for typing documents since like age 6, I still certainly find something weirdly appealing about that ridiculous documents-only-tank thing. Clearly its best use would be as a Kindle for Project Gutenberg. Does anyone know anything about MPEG boards? This is a particular piece of technology I should have figured existed once upon a time but I honestly just learned about for the first time this past week when reading someone's recollection of trying to play a video in the 1990s. This is the only Wikipedia article I have found on one, and my eyes have still not finished bugging out after finding this webpage for a company that, quite possibly, you could still get one from? I mean...were they really just a straightforwardly boring-now-but-exciting-then technology that played .MPGs and that was it? Did they have rudimentary video editing built in? Also I see they were apparently also sound cards--why were these not marketed as MULTIMEDIA EXPANSION BOARD XXXTREME and flying off the shelves? Or were they? I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS man I never knew a single person who ever mentioned something like this when discussing the concept of playing videos on your computer in the 1990s (the best you got was "I hear MMX playback is a little better!"), and I saw many a conversation on that subject on many a BBS because I am certainly, as the last few posts have also implied, an old.
|
|
#
?
May 29, 2017 16:06
|
|
|
Dr. Quarex posted:Despite having used computers for typing documents since like age 6, I still certainly find something weirdly appealing about that ridiculous documents-only-tank thing. Clearly its best use would be as a Kindle for Project Gutenberg. So the best use for something with a 4x40 character screen would be reading ebooks? Do you do a lot of typing while reading Project Gutenberg books?
|
|
#
?
May 29, 2017 16:18
|
|
|
Dr. Quarex posted:Despite having used computers for typing documents since like age 6, I still certainly find something weirdly appealing about that ridiculous documents-only-tank thing. Clearly its best use would be as a Kindle for Project Gutenberg. I still have a one of them lying around, a RealMagic board, but I don't think I ever put it in anything. Since, at the time, you could only watch a postage-stamp-size .mpg video without your poor CPU bogging down, doing it in hardware was an obvious improvement, but they were expensive and really didn't have a niche. Once DVD's were a Thing, the .mpg2 boards sold pretty well, since you needed every bit of a 3-500mhz CPU to do software playback properly. But CPU's were getting faster and dedicated players were getting cheaper and they fell by the wayside in a couple years as well.
|
|
#
?
May 29, 2017 16:22
|
|
|
Dr. Quarex posted:Despite having used computers for typing documents since like age 6, I still certainly find something weirdly appealing about that ridiculous documents-only-tank thing. Clearly its best use would be as a Kindle for Project Gutenberg. Hey I remember those. I think they were sort of popular in the late 90's. Most of the time that functionality was packaged with TV Tuner/recorder cards, though. Anyone remember the ATi AllInWonder cards? Video playback could really bring a late 90's system to its knees. It was a big deal for Rebel Assault 1 & 2 from what I remember. The CPUs weren't optimized for media codecs then, though Intel started to change that with MMX. (poo poo, they still made these in 2008)
|
|
#
?
May 29, 2017 16:38
|
|
|
Hauppauge cards were extremely My poo poo.
|
|
#
?
May 29, 2017 16:40
|
|
|
We had a RealMagic card on this monster $4,000 PC we got in the 90s. Being able to watch fullscreen FMV was cool, but we never bought a single game/program that took advantage of it as far as I know. It came with Cowboy Casino and Silent Steel (maybe they were just demos, I honestly can't remember).
|
|
#
?
May 29, 2017 16:57
|
|
|
Tearing apart a supercomputer: https://youtu.be/RxAvDwZN2ZE (Audio has bad desync it's not your computer)
|
|
#
?
May 29, 2017 18:57
|
|
|
Dr. Quarex posted:I mean...were they really just a straightforwardly boring-now-but-exciting-then technology that played .MPGs and that was it? Did they have rudimentary video editing built in? Also I see they were apparently also sound cards--why were these not marketed as MULTIMEDIA EXPANSION BOARD XXXTREME and flying off the shelves? As others noted, this was back when you chose to do word processing or play an MP3, but maybe not both if you wanted to type in real time or have steady music. The limitations of systems in the 90s were very real and very much not geared to multimedia browsing or multitasking. Hell, iirc they actually marketed a FPU expansion board for my Mac Performa at some point. Thankfully, the jump from like 500Mhz to 1+Ghz processors, and the more spacious RAM, evened things out a bit.
|
|
#
?
May 29, 2017 19:33
|
|
|
FilthyImp posted:Just remember that most of us were watching videos online through RealPlayer and its shitfuck codec and you'll see why and MPG expansion board might have been a good investment for someone with some cash that didn't want to get a new computer. Remember my windows system being so on the edge of mp3 playing I had the choice of either playing the mp3s or move a mouse. Moving the mouse was an instant hiccups. I still have those mp3s and listen to them. One of them has this weird audio effect of like a tiny skip but just really sped up music for that part because the encoder was just garbage doing that part. I got so used to it that when I listened to the album digitally later on from Google play, it felt off when it got through that part without the skip.
|
|
#
?
May 29, 2017 19:47
|
|
|
I remember my friends/family always asking me to make mixed CDs for them because we got our burner pretty early (at least compared to everyone else in Podunk Newfoundland). Couldn't do poo poo at all while making the discs else they'd fail. Not even like post on forums or something.
|
|
#
?
May 29, 2017 20:00
|
|
|
Three-Phase posted:Tearing apart a supercomputer: We have a few room-sized computing systems at work. One of the smaller ones is an IBM Netezza, takes up only a few racks. They've got some impressive 3P/480V power supplies and cooling fans. We moved the system from one building to another a while back. We must have knocked one of the PSU module lose from one of its rails on the way. The other two PSUs tried to make up for it and the increased load on them made the fans spin at maximum, sounding like a mini jet engine. If the rack doors weren't secured when this happened, they would blow open quite forcefully. They generate a lot of heat. The room has a separate, dedicated AC that keeps temperatures to ~55-60 deg F. On the rare occasions that we lose power, we have a UPS that will run the Netezza for 30 minutes. That's enough time to shut everything down, which you should be doing when the AC is out. It only takes about an hour to raise the room temperatures from 60 to 85.
|
|
#
?
May 29, 2017 20:20
|
|
|
EVIL Gibson posted:Remember my windows system being so on the edge of mp3 playing I had the choice of either playing the mp3s or move a mouse. Moving the mouse was an instant hiccups. I have the same thing with songs I listened to on vinyl before CDs. My mom's copy of "Goodbye Yellow Brock Road" had a skip right in the middle of "Love Lies Bleeding" and it sounded so weird without it for the longest time. Mak0rz posted:I remember my friends/family always asking me to make mixed CDs for them because we got our burner pretty early (at least compared to everyone else in Podunk Newfoundland). There's no words for how infuriating this was. You pop in a CD, hit burn, then hold your breath for 30 minutes. It gets almost all the way to the end before popping up a "Buffer underrun!" error and ejecting your brand new $2 coaster. 
|
|
#
?
May 29, 2017 20:47
|
|
|
A Pinball Wizard posted:I have the same thing with songs I listened to on vinyl before CDs. My mom's copy of "Goodbye Yellow Brock Road" had a skip right in the middle of "Love Lies Bleeding" and it sounded so weird without it for the longest time. Why was that process so unreliable?
|
|
#
?
May 29, 2017 22:56
|
|
|
tactlessbastard posted:Why was that process so unreliable? Slow CPUs, slow IO and memory was expensive, so buffers were very small. If anything interrupted the system long enough for the CD data buffer to drain it was all over. The rule when burning CDs was to close all programs, turn off the screensaver, hang up the modem/unplug the network cable, and say a little prayer. Even then it would sometimes just fail for seemingly no reason.
|
|
#
?
May 29, 2017 23:04
|
|
|
By the time I had a CD burner in 2002, the issue with bad discs and being unable to do anything seemed to be gone. I rarely had any issues with the CDs that I made.
|
|
#
?
May 29, 2017 23:31
|
|
|
my first cd burner was on a laptop around 2002 and it definitely needed prayers
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2017 00:14
|
|
|
I had a live bootleg in around 2004 of an Oasis concert that sounded fine on my laptop but played with a shitton of hiss and noise on my mp3 player. Might have been the other way around. Never figured out if it was an encoding thing or just the quality of the respective hardware.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2017 00:25
|
|
|
The_Franz posted:Slow CPUs, slow IO and memory was expensive, so buffers were very small. If anything interrupted the system long enough for the CD data buffer to drain it was all over. The second or so it took to cache/load the folder, led to a slow dying of the CD burn cache, hovered at like 1%, then rose back up to 99%. The burn failed due to buffer underrun.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2017 00:49
|
|
|
Star Man posted:By the time I had a CD burner in 2002, the issue with bad discs and being unable to do anything seemed to be gone. I rarely had any issues with the CDs that I made. There were still problems especially with the ever increasing burn rates. Finding a good burner drive and then the media that works well with it (that could handle the burn speeds) was like trying to find two specific needles out of a haystack of needles of too many brands and types. I took the "LiteOn" as a good drive and the first to really fix the buffer underrun problem (think it was called Burn Proof?) And just looked for discs that it would be able to handle. To be honest, I was okay at burning at 4 or 12 (since CD ROM s at the time read the slower burned rates) and waiting longer than trying to hit the 32 -48x write speeds. Now that I am talking about it, around that time manufacturers tried to increase the read and write speeds and found a hard limit when generic CDs/DVDs we're used . Like above 52 or maybe 54 discs kept shattering and ruining drives from the plastic shrapnel.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2017 00:59
|
|
|
I do appreciate how software forced you to gamble when you burned by picking a burn speed.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2017 01:02
|
|
|
Star Man posted:By the time I had a CD burner in 2002, the issue with bad discs and being unable to do anything seemed to be gone. I rarely had any issues with the CDs that I made. Same. The burner I had advertised a huuuuge 8MB buffer!
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2017 01:18
|
|
|
It wasn't just the burners themselves that were sketchy, there was a huge difference in the quality of different brands of CDRs. Some were way more coaster-prone than others, and some had a terribly short shelf-life, too.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2017 01:28
|
|
|
Every 1996 Cavalier on the market is littered in silver flakes from the top sides of lovely CDRs.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2017 01:35
|
|
|
Speaking of CD burners, has LightScribe been mentioned yet? It was a burner that, with the right CDs, you could burn a label into the top side of the disc with its laser. I had one on my first laptop (circa 2006) but I never had the right discs so I never tried it out. I'm curious to know if they worked well/at all. Obviously I don't think they ever caught on.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2017 01:39
|
|
|
It worked ok.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2017 01:45
|
|
|
I used to use the multi-session burn feature to incrementally write (non backed up) data directly to a CD-R. In the buffer underrun days. It taught me the pain of data loss.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2017 01:51
|
|
|
1000 Brown M and Ms posted:I had one on my first laptop (circa 2006) but I never had the right discs so I never tried it out. I'm curious to know if they worked well/at all. Obviously I don't think they ever caught on. It would be great for poo poo like Thompson Family Reunion 02 with everyone's picture as the cover the but prices man.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2017 01:52
|
|
|
FilthyImp posted:I had an all-in-one printer with that poo poo. It was everywhere, and I only saw ONE disc with it -- a buddy burned one of the Star Wars shooters to it with a badass Vader head and the title. It looked ok under a certain angle, but kind of faint most of the time. I had a lightscribe burner and I did the lightscribe thing a few times. It was pretty faint but the discs had some barcode thing or something on the top which told the label printing where to start, so you could do the same print a few times on the same disc and it would make it darker each time you printed.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2017 02:12
|
|
|
Dr. Quarex posted:Does anyone know anything about MPEG boards? This is a particular piece of technology I should have figured existed once upon a time but I honestly just learned about for the first time this past week when reading someone's recollection of trying to play a video in the 1990s. Back then an NLE was heavily constrained by limitations of the day. Everything was usually developed on specialised hardware cards that plugged into your computer. Companies like Media 100 often provided accelerator cards designed to be hooked into certain programs or improve plugin render speeds. Or other companies like VideoToaster, Quantel and AVID made dedicated support systems costing thousands.  A high end desktop system in 1996 would have 128mb of RAM, perhaps 1 or 2 GB of storage often hooked into a disk array that might have 4Gb in total as a temp storage drive. That's not including the array of support equipment to get BetaSP tape into digital in the first place, and filling the system with cards such as Yarc co-processor boards or RasterOps vision cards that allowed higher resolution outputs. Then throw in your audio switches, DAT backups and magneto optical drives, the whole shebang of early desktop editing was pricey for the time. Systems were usually built and rented out, making it a challenge as confidential material had to be backed up and then wiped at the end of the session. Most editing systems usually operated "off-line" that is a low resolution capture of the tape's analogue signal was made into a digital file, usually something low res with the Cinepak codec, and then edited in the program then outputted via edit decision lists (EDLs) to fed into a machine that would copy the relevant chunks off the master tapes; "on-line". The introduction of better video codecs that weren't so processor intensive picked up steam when the DV standards came up around 1995 and anyone could simply use a DV Camcorder and a firewire port to capture and print. Broadcast and TV operated this way for a while as the signal image was low enough to be passed off. Many effects methods we take for granted were pioneered on shows like The Next Generation as the ability to scan in footage and not be restrained by the limits of optical compositing gave them the leeway. Film editing operated in a similar was as high end AVID systems were the only ones able to do a proper 16/35mm conversion from captured video until enthusiasts developed CinemaTools and allowed Final Cut Pro to transform from a simple broadcast editing package into one that could do motion pictures.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2017 02:32
|
|
|
My first CD burner was a Plextor that cost twice as much as a typical model because it could reliably duplicate the weird subchannel data and intentional bad sectors of copy protected game discs. Plextor drive + Verbatim discs = no coasters ever Until some shitlords starting making counterfeit Verbatims.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2017 02:40
|
|
|
TotalLossBrain posted:We have a few room-sized computing systems at work. One of the smaller ones is an IBM Netezza, takes up only a few racks. They've got some impressive 3P/480V power supplies and cooling fans. We moved the system from one building to another a while back. We must have knocked one of the PSU module lose from one of its rails on the way. Supercomputer power chat: some of the Cray systems required I believe 208V or 480V power at 400Hz, not 60 or 50. So generally that required that between the supercomputer power supplies and the wall you needed to have motor-generators to make AC at 400Hz. The advantage is that this basically completely isolates the system from the utility power so it helps reduce the chance of a power surge damaging a $10M computer. Also the higher the frequency the easier it is to filter out the AC "ripple" when it's rectified from AC to D.C.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2017 03:29
|
|
|
Three-Phase posted:Supercomputer power chat: some of the Cray systems required I believe 208V or 480V power at 400Hz, not 60 or 50. The reason might just be a contracting requirement. Lots of military equipment, aviation, ships run on 400 Hz. I expect a vendor like Cray to offer that as a PSU option.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2017 04:39
|
|
|
I can totally see Cray going with 400 Hz to idiot‐proof the power delivery by requiring a rotary converter. This is a company that hired women of tiered heights to optimise efficiency in wiring their machines.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2017 04:58
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 21, 2024 16:23 |
|
|
A FUCKIN CANARY!! posted:My first CD burner was a Plextor that cost twice as much as a typical model because it could reliably duplicate the weird subchannel data and intentional bad sectors of copy protected game discs. That's the one I had I think. I remember renting playstation games and going hog wild.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2017 05:41
|
|