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When ebay was small enough, I remember there used to be a "neutral" 3rd party "online feedback profile" website of some sort. Does anybody remember that? When buying and selling, say, computer parts on [H]ardOCP, people would put in their post a link to this online feedback profile. After you bought something, you would rate the person. Of course there was almost no repercussion for fake ratings, though the seller could give you a code to enter on the feedback website for "verified" purchases. For the life of me, I cannot remember what that website was called. However, I DO remember seeing ebay postings from new users with a mention of their username on the forum sale feedback site, to "give credibility" to them before they built up their ebay feedback profile. Man I'm getting a brain rush of late-90's early-00's online buying and selling now. Some guy who worked at Intel as a chip sorter sold me a 3.4Ghz ES (engineering sample) hyperthreaded pentium 4 for like $200. Ran games gud with whatever video card I had at the time (a 6800? That was a beast of a card). When I went to move out I tried selling the same CPU on the same forum, [H]ardOCP, but my posting was removed because allegedly all ES CPUs were stolen. I guess technically they were?
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Apr 26, 2018 22:41
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ES CPUs are all classified as Intel property, but I've never heard of anyone prosecuted for reselling them. On most of the hardware forums I've used there's occasionally been 'extra special' CPU threads, although they're not overly popular due to chip bugs and poor motherboard support. If it's the site I'm thinking on it's Heatware, which is still used on most hardware forums with classifieds sections. I bought a ton of weird hardware during the AGP era using USPS money orders on forums like that.
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Apr 26, 2018 22:51
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Hell yeah it was heatware. My old account is gone though 
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Apr 26, 2018 23:01
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I recall reading an article around 1999 in TIME about the novelty of getting a dinner party sorted with ordering everything online. http://gsb.haifa.ac.il/~sheizaf/ecommerce/timemagazine/margaret.html "Internet dinner party!!" http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2054827,00.html quote:If all goes according to his daring--some might say outlandish--plan, this warehouse will be at capacity within the next few years and will handle everything: washing machines, cars, rubber gaskets, Prozac, exercise machines, marmalade, model airplanes, everything but firearms and certain live animals. You name it, Amazon will sell it. Anything, says Bezos, with a capital A
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Apr 27, 2018 00:08
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WebDog posted:I recall reading an article around 1999 in TIME about the novelty of getting a dinner party sorted with ordering everything online. Christ that was nearly 2 decades ago. gently caress you for making me feel old when I'm barely 31. Also need merge of the  and  smilies. will have to do.Edit: looks like the wheelchair dude is being jerked off which isn't quite what I was going for but I'll take it.
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Apr 27, 2018 00:21
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WebDog posted:I recall reading an article around 1999 in TIME about the novelty of getting a dinner party sorted with ordering everything online. Talking of tech relics what a pleasure it is to read content from a mostly text website unencumbered by countless scripts loading from dozens of domains, lazy-loads popping in to reflow the page as you're reading, overlays popping up-around-and-over content, or developers getting cute with janky soft scrolling.
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Apr 27, 2018 01:27
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I'm just going to come out and say it: I miss the tactile sensation of inserting a floppy disk, hearing the click of the disk locking into place and listening to the drive read it. Same for the sound of a tape being inserted and locking into a VCR.
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Apr 27, 2018 02:22
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Carth Dookie posted:I'm just going to come out and say it:
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Apr 27, 2018 03:05
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Known Lecher posted:There's a lot of legitimate reasons to hate on Paypal, but the times before Paypal also suuuuuuuucked for using eBay. On the plus side not everyone was on eBay yet, so you could find some real deals on stuff that escaped notice by the masses. Literally the only online store I bought anything from in the 1990s besides maybe one or two things from EBay was ... telnet.cdconnection.com!!! Browsing through their stock was basically the most luxurious text-based capitalism of the era. I probably bought 50+ CDs from them, which was saying something as I probably only bought ~200 non-used CDs ever. The_Franz posted:These days everyone wants cash, nobody is willing to entertain interesting trades anymore. That brings to mind a tech relic I do not think we have ever talked about here: MrSwap.com, the short-lived but so fantastic half-flea-market-half-swap-meet of the Internet. I remember sending in about a dozen random CDs that were for some reason in high demand and getting, I think, No One Lives Forever 2, not long after it came out. SO EFFICIENT Another company tried to pick up where it left off when it shut down out of the blue by doing CD trades only, and I signed up excitedly. Then I found like five CDs they were looking for, said I would send them in, and they sent out pre-paid shipping envelopes just big enough for the CDs. No case, no album art, nothing. I e-mailed them basically "...WTF?" and they said "this is our service, send the CD" and I was like "lol [string of expletives from edgy teenager]" and they were gone within a year, unsurprisingly.
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Apr 27, 2018 03:55
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Empress Brosephine posted:I love these eBay stories share more! my uncle was all over ebay from the beginning mostly because of him and my aunt being really into antiquing and living on the east coast back in the late 90s there was a ton of poo poo that you could ship west for like a 100-200% markup like someone else said. You could also actually create a niche collection for a reasonable amout of money back then if it wasn't something like baseball cards or bennie babys. He's got some kick rear end early worlds-fair stuff displayed in cabinets in the living room that he picked up just checking out ebay in the early days and selling stuff he found locally. Like a certain plate/dish sets that started around where I grew up (I forget what they were). Also he bought a voting machine from miami-dade used in the 2000 election that was like $30 bucks maybe.
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Apr 27, 2018 04:09
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Computer viking posted:In the same vein, you wouldn't believe how cheap Steam was back when the dollar was weak, the Norwegian Krone strong, and steam listed everything in dollars. It was something like 50% off everything compared to buying in a store - it felt like it ought to be illegal. It was a sad day when they moved to regional pricing. Regional pricing worked out for New Zealand as it got locked almost exactly when NZD came close to parity with USD. It is significantly weaker now but we retain the good exchange rate. In the 90's it was 2:1 favouring the dollar making any imports cost a kidney. Not to say Steam retailers can't use 2:1 pricing but that just means they don't buy it from Steam. You either go to the source or a reseller. $100 NZD($70 USD) for a AAA? sod off. Back in the 90's early 2K it was hard to escape this as you needed a friend or relative to do it. I had a friend do this for me when I had a Gamecube which was almost nothing needed to mod for US region. Lik-sang and the like really opened things up. I paid maybe $200 NZD($100USD) to play Perfect Dark 64. To salt the wound the US would get discounts and good ones too as the games got old. To this day we rarely do and it takes ages. If you like the next chance I get I can take some photos of some really old games (NDS) still selling for full price as the older ones don't show on the website. Here is a taste: $120($85USD) for a preorder for Luigi's Mansion. https://www.ebgames.co.nz/3ds-225637-Luigis-Mansion-Nintendo-3DS It's EBgames so I doubt it is much of a surprise.
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Apr 27, 2018 05:10
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Carth Dookie posted:I'm just going to come out and say it: Personally, I think that's one of the main reasons vinyl is resurgent these days, it's so physical and tactile. It's definitely one of the main reasons I have some, it's much more satisfying than a Spotify playlist or whatever. Digital music, while really convenient, has a certain ephemerality that kind of sucks. Before anyone accuses me of being a luddite, the vast majority of the music I listen to is digital in one way or another, but sometimes it's just really nice to put on a vinyl record.
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Apr 27, 2018 06:45
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The ritual is part of the appeal.
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Apr 27, 2018 06:54
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Carth Dookie posted:The ritual is part of the appeal. Also not just hitting skip on your 10000 song collection of MP3s. You played an album start to finish.
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Apr 27, 2018 09:02
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Humphreys posted:Using Sub7 on dialup to remotely connect to my friends dad who was over a microwave connection on a resort island resulted in me and his son sending porn to his printer used to do SCUBA certificates. Fun times. Oh man, I had a blast loving with people with Sub7 back in the day. I must've been around 13 or 14. There were tools to roll your own variant that could do stuff like ping you on ICQ (another wonderful relic) whenever an infected user came online. Some kid I vaguely knew from some dumb 'hacking' channel on IRC somehow managed to infect himself with my variant - god knows where he got it, as I hadn't sent it to him and I wasn't actively uploading that crap anywhere. I had fun screwing with him by making his disc drive open and close, making the caps/num/scroll lock keyboard lights flash on and off and periodically typing into the Word document he was doing his homework in. Then his dad (or someone claiming to be his dad) came and started typing very angry messages about how he was going to call the police on me for 'hacking'. At this point I noticed that the CD in the drive was a single of Lolly's cover of 'Hey Mickey', so I turned up the volume and started blasting that horrible song and spinning the monitor display round while he wrote increasingly pissed off messages. After about 20 minutes of this I got bored and told the 'dad' I'd remove the virus if he promised to tell his idiot son to not run random .exe files he found on the internet ever again. I was a very edgy teenager, as you can tell.
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Apr 27, 2018 10:43
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Humphreys posted:Also not just hitting skip on your 10000 song collection of MP3s. You played an album start to finish. It's not just that though. A vinyl album is a 12" by 12" [i]thing[/] that you have to look at and check out when you want to play it. CDs? Tapes? Digital music? They're all kinda tiny. I'm playing a copy of Blasting Concept Volume II and about half of it is poo poo I wouldn't listen to if someone paid me but I'm waiting for the Saccharine Trust track so I listen to all of it. It's kinda why I like pandora over the other music services. The fact that I can't control the next track means I end up getting exposed to things I'd never go out and listen to.
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Apr 27, 2018 10:58
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Empress Brosephine posted:I remember buy.com! What was the other site eBay owned that was like warehouse items? It’s escaping my mind Half.com?
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Apr 27, 2018 11:15
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Quote-Unquote posted:Oh man, I had a blast loving with people with Sub7 back in the day. I must've been around 13 or 14. In a similar vein I remember 'teaching' an idiot on our Counterstrike server how to bind !give. Being an rear end in a top hat I gave him the script so the W key was !give. "You will always be reloaded no matter where you go!" (he was PISSED)
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Apr 27, 2018 11:37
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Humphreys posted:Also not just hitting skip on your 10000 song collection of MP3s. You played an album start to finish. I use LPs almost exclusively for parties. Prevents some "party DJ" taking over the system and playing the first 20 seconds of their seemingly unending supply of similar-sounding lovely rap songs.
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Apr 27, 2018 12:14
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klafbang posted:I use LPs almost exclusively for parties. Prevents some "party DJ" taking over the system and playing the first 20 seconds of their seemingly unending supply of similar-sounding lovely rap songs. Oh god I would never let randoms loose at a party of mine when LPs are in play. *scratchy scratchy* I was guilty of it myself but got tought very quickly not to scratch someone elses records. Granted it was an old house DJ from Ministry of Sound (the club in London)... Also when I used to sell high end record players I learnt to hate 'Hotel California' and anything by Pink Floyd. It seemed to be the same stuff every record nerd would bring in to demo our stuff. Humphreys has a new favorite as of 12:47 on Apr 27, 2018 |
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Apr 27, 2018 12:44
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Casimir Radon posted:I'd kind of like to mess around with some 90s - early 00s Mac software. What's a good decision as far as a machine to run most of what's out there? The PearPC emulator apparently runs Mac OS X "well with some caveats" if you want to play with the software without the hardware. I've only ever used PearPC to run plain Darwin without the OS X GUI on top so don't know anything beyond what that page says. Carth Dookie posted:I miss the tactile sensation of inserting a floppy disk, hearing the click of the disk locking into place and listening to the drive read it.  It's probably been like 2 months 
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Apr 27, 2018 13:53
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhvfa3zRaGs $17,000 PC from 1990: IBM PS/2 Model 90 XP 486
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Apr 27, 2018 14:34
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The Big Word posted:I recently picked up an iphone 8 and the new vibration tech compared to my old 6 has me really excited about the kinds of haptic feedback we'll see appearing over the coming years. Even if it's all "faked" I reckon we're in for a lot of satisfyingly clicky future tech. The nintendo switch does this, and it's great. The stereo speakers are right next to where the controllers slot in, and it uses a combination of sound and HD Rumble™ to make a really satisfying click, and it's subtle enough that I didn't even notice it until I put them in there after turning the system off one day and I got the same uncomfortable sensation you get from a limp handshake.
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Apr 27, 2018 18:16
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Humphreys posted:
My hatred of "Hotel California" is having to listen to a piano instrumental cover of it a million times at a flower and gifts store I used to work at.
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Apr 27, 2018 18:19
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Star Man posted:My hatred of "Hotel California" is having to listen to a piano instrumental cover of it a million times at a flower and gifts store I used to work at. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7Vo_t7zbeQ
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Apr 27, 2018 20:13
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Humphreys posted:Also when I used to sell high end record players I learnt to hate 'Hotel California' and anything by Pink Floyd. It seemed to be the same stuff every record nerd would bring in to demo our stuff. Any audiophile worth their salt would have to bring in some Deutsche Grammophon stuff or at least Donald Fagen’s “The Nightfly”  Also, I still have a few shoeboxes full of floppy disks. I wonder whether it’s better to bet on a USB floppy drive to be compatible and functional, or to get a cheap Windows XP box with a Pentium 4 inside, one of those gaudy Dell Optiplex things.
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Apr 27, 2018 23:31
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Laserjet 4P posted:Also, I still have a few shoeboxes full of floppy disks. I wonder whether it’s better to bet on a USB floppy drive to be compatible and functional, or to get a cheap Windows XP box with a Pentium 4 inside, one of those gaudy Dell Optiplex things.
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Apr 27, 2018 23:56
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Carth Dookie posted:I'm just going to come out and say it: Absolutely same. Zip disks were pretty satisfying too. CDs are possibly the least satisfying thing possible. Minidiscs were ok. I've got a USB floppy drive that I got with a Thinkpad years ago, but the only floppy disks I have around are 5.25" disks with old PDP-11 software and a couple 8" disks I keep around to show people. I graduated high school in 2005 and USB sticks were starting to become a thing, but most people just used floppy disks for school work because every computer had a floppy drive. Floppies seemed to be super unreliable at that point; the reasoning I've heard was that in the face of declining supply, nobody had manufactured new disks in a while and a new-in-box disk might already be 5 years old. In any case, the tactile joy of inserting a floppy disk was quickly killed when you'd hear the drive start to make the "bad disk" noises and you realize you might not be printing out that document after all. Speaking of bad media, I'm pretty sure I had an old hard drive in college that actually destroyed 2 motherboards just by plugging it in and powering on. Luckily it was an old drive and they were old boards I'd pulled off the loading dock, but they worked before I tried booting from that disk and didn't work afterward.
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Apr 27, 2018 23:58
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Pham Nuwen posted:Absolutely same. Zip disks were pretty satisfying too. CDs are possibly the least satisfying thing possible. Minidiscs were ok. I miss all the noises my IBM Aptiva would make when it was loading data from the CD.
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Apr 28, 2018 00:04
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Laserjet 4P posted:Also, I still have a few shoeboxes full of floppy disks. I wonder whether it’s better to bet on a USB floppy drive to be compatible and functional, or to get a cheap Windows XP box with a Pentium 4 inside, one of those gaudy Dell Optiplex things. I heard that sometimes USB floppy drives - and in fact even modern non-USB floppy drives - don't support 720KB disks or special higher-density formats like those used by some backup software or software like this (which I somehow remembered the name of and was able to find the documentation for somewhere on my hard drive): pre: FEATURES OF FDFORMAT
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FDFORMAT is a replacement for the DOS-Format program, which has
the following advantages:
1) Supporting 3½"-1.44 MB drives with any BIOS-Versions in ATs and
Clones. This saves you a lot of money, you would need for a new
BIOS-Version.
2) Formatting and using of 720/820 kByte disks in AT 5¼"-1.2 MByte
Drives using cheap double-density (DD) disks.
3) Increasing the capacity of your disks up to 300 kByte
additional storage.
4) Supporting 3½"-360 kByte format. This is useful, when you want
to make copies of 5¼"-disks to 3½"-Disks using DISKCOPY
5) Enhance speed of your diskette I/O up to 100% with sector
sliding. This is a method of physical ordering sectors in a
way, that your drive is ready to read the next logical sector,
when your head advances one track.
6) Improved BOOT-Sector, which automatically boots from harddisk,
if the diskette in drive A: is not a system disk. This allows
you to leave the diskette in drive A:, when you reboot the
system.
I think that for the best compatibility, you need to get a KryoFlux (and I think you need to attach a real floppy drive to it), or just use an old PC with a floppy drive header on the motherboard. At some point I need to install DOS on a 486 - or something of a similar speed - to try to restore some old backups, where the backup software doesn't work properly if the CPU is too fast 
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Apr 28, 2018 01:01
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Randaconda posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhvfa3zRaGs This is great and I have a new favorite youtube channel to dive into 
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Apr 28, 2018 02:30
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Randaconda posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhvfa3zRaGs
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Apr 28, 2018 03:07
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Remember this poo poo?
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Apr 28, 2018 04:09
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mystes posted:Wow it would have been crazy to have a 486 in 1990. On the other hand everyone had them just a few years later. It was really amazing how fast things were moving then. Yeah, it kind of sucked actually. My family's first computer was a 100MHz Pentium machine in 1996 and it was pretty good for the time, but by 1998/1999 it was struggling. A lot of newer games just wouldn't run on it, or if they did they were laggy or you had to turn down all the graphics settings. In contrast, I've had my current computer for 4.5 years and it's still going fine. Sure, it's not great for games, but it was never a gaming rig in the first place. I have no plans to replace it any time soon. I'm not sure if Moore's Law still applies to computers in general these days, but it certainly doesn't seem to apply to most consumer-level machines, and I have to say I'm ok with that.
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Apr 28, 2018 04:19
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Humphreys posted:Remember this poo poo? Criticism Bit Tech: Why Intel's DRM strategy is flawed Inquirer: Intel Viiv is stupid and broken Inquirer: Intel's Viiv is an embarrassment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Viiv#Criticism
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Apr 28, 2018 04:21
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1000 Brown M and Ms posted:I'm not sure if Moore's Law still applies to computers in general these days, but it certainly doesn't seem to apply to most consumer-level machines, and I have to say I'm ok with that. Not really. They're starting to hit the etchings limit with current technology, getting better than 10nm is gonna be tough, and these days most people are more concerned with a good speed to power ratio than pure muscle.
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Apr 28, 2018 04:44
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My PC is still running on an i5 2500K from 2011 and I've never felt limited by it. Trying to use a 2001 CPU for general daily use in 2008 would probably result in some sort of explosion.
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Apr 28, 2018 05:30
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1000 Brown M and Ms posted:Yeah, it kind of sucked actually. My family's first computer was a 100MHz Pentium machine in 1996 and it was pretty good for the time, but by 1998/1999 it was struggling. A lot of newer games just wouldn't run on it, or if they did they were laggy or you had to turn down all the graphics settings. Moore's Law is out and has been for quite a few years. Most of the gains is less the cores are faster but having more cores and squeezing more IPC. I have a 4770K and a 780ti both over 5 years old now and it still plays modern games just fine. It's not 4K ultra detail but is gets 1080/60 on pretty drat high if you know which graphics settings to drop. Because of consoles always having laughably weak CPUs you only need a new GFX card and I am not going to replace mine until maybe the 20xx series and the buttcoin miners to sod off. Add an SSD if you haven't already and your good to go for gaming. There is a limit to this like running a Q9550 Core 2 Quad isn't reasonable which is 10 years old and Moore's Law was still in effect but you can still hold off from something new with an I-series.
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Apr 28, 2018 05:41
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1000 Brown M and Ms posted:I'm not sure if Moore's Law still applies to computers in general these days, but it certainly doesn't seem to apply to most consumer-level machines, and I have to say I'm ok with that. I dont think i've seen much above 4 Ghz in the consumer world, even.
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Apr 28, 2018 06:02
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oohhboy posted:Moore's Law is out and has been for quite a few years. Most of the gains is less the cores are faster but having more cores and squeezing more IPC. I have a 4770K and a 780ti both over 5 years old now and it still plays modern games just fine. It's not 4K ultra detail but is gets 1080/60 on pretty drat high if you know which graphics settings to drop. I just hit the wall of my Phenom II not being able to play Far Cry 5 because it doesn't support SSE4. It has handled everything up to now at 1080/60, but now it looks like I really have finally reached the point I need to upgrade. Built this machine in 2011, albeit with an eye to future-proofing as much as possible and have upgraded the GPU several times over the years.
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Apr 28, 2018 06:06
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