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Oh god that HP Deskjet driver was horribly unstable in Windows 3.1, and is probably the reason I still prefer to save before I print.
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Jul 21, 2019 22:28
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I remember lots of hassles with HP drivers for Mac in the early 2000s. I worked in a Mac-centric office, and occasionally had to do reinstalls or set up new machines, and we had bog standard Laserjets. It seems like every time I needed to get drivers, for the same type of machine and the same OS version, it required a convoluted search process and way more time than it should have. It was infrequent enough that it took me a long time to just keep the driver files on-hand rather than get them online. Printing on early Mac OS X was a loving adventure all on its own, too.
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Jul 21, 2019 22:36
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Found in the electronics recycling bin at my work... we really only throw something out when it's entireley useless. The HD-DVD player is probably the youngest thing to ever go in there. We still have another HP 720 inkjet in service. Best inkjet of all time 
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Jul 21, 2019 22:46
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0toShifty posted:Found in the electronics recycling bin at my work... we really only throw something out when it's entireley useless. The HD-DVD player is probably the youngest thing to ever go in there. drat, I hadn't thought about that latter-day Betamax in a long time.
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Jul 21, 2019 22:47
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In high school C programming class we learned that ms office Open (as in pick a file to open) windows acted the same as win explorer windows, so even though windows explorer was somehow made unavailable to students, we could just burn poo poo to disc, open the Open boxes in word and excel, navigate to source and destination folders and drag/drop between them Pair this with the system() C function (which just runs commands via the terminal i.e. dos prompt on a win2k box) and we were able to copy mad games to the hard drive and write a frontend launcher. Unreal tournament 99 works if you just copy the whole folder, no installer/registry stuff needed!
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Jul 21, 2019 23:02
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0toShifty posted:
We used the exact printer in your photo for ages, I'd almost forgotten about that one! e: it was a printer at home and i printed porn out on it once Last Chance has a new favorite as of 23:41 on Jul 21, 2019 |
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Jul 21, 2019 23:14
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Last Chance posted:e: it was a printer at home and i printed porn out on it once I was recently going through one of my old game boxes (Elvira 2) and found some softcore printouts I had made on a dot matrix printer. LOL
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Jul 22, 2019 00:22
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TotalLossBrain posted:I was recently going through one of my old game boxes (Elvira 2) and found some softcore printouts I had made on a dot matrix printer. LOL e: Spoilering the image out of an abundance of caution.  Yeah, I know, it's ASCII but it's what came to mind.
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Jul 22, 2019 01:37
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Alizée...
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Jul 22, 2019 01:40
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Last Chance posted:e: it was a printer at home and i printed porn out on it once Not really a tech relic story because it happened in 2012-ish on contemporary hardware but one time in grad school my supervisor came in to the lab and found printouts of a well endowed Suicide Girls model on the printer. I was the only person in the lab that day and he probably thought it was me  My colleagues and I came to the conclusion that it must have been the teenage son of one of the masters students browsing porn on his mom's laptop and accidentally sent it to the lab printer (which the laptop had remote access to).
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Jul 22, 2019 03:41
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My favourite bit of lax computer security at my school was that the mice for the computers in the physics lab were kept in a different room unless the lesson involved computers. I'm not sure the computers had logins (they were old even then) but I could be wrong. Anyway, if you knew the shortcuts you could use the computer almost as normal just with the keyboard which myself and the other nerds did.
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Jul 22, 2019 05:10
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0toShifty posted:Found in the electronics recycling bin at my work... we really only throw something out when it's entireley useless. The HD-DVD player is probably the youngest thing to ever go in there. Tallest short guy; least war criminal American politician; best inkjet...
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Jul 22, 2019 05:29
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My favourite discovery in High School was learning that they only blocked applications running by filename. If you renamed an emulator to 'notepad.exe' it would run without a hitch. Netplay even worked over the school network.
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Jul 22, 2019 23:18
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The Jack Chop Guy posted:In high school C programming class we learned that ms office Open (as in pick a file to open) windows acted the same as win explorer windows, so even though windows explorer was somehow made unavailable to students, we could just burn poo poo to disc, open the Open boxes in word and excel, navigate to source and destination folders and drag/drop between them Similar tip I learned from working at a bank that had File Explorer access cut off on our remote systems: On most computers with this restriction, nobody's bothered to remove the option to triple-click a folder in the Start menu to open it. (Because outside of this example, most people have no reason to know that option's even there.)
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Jul 22, 2019 23:25
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Dewgy posted:Similar tip I learned from working at a bank that had File Explorer access cut off on our remote systems: On most computers with this restriction, nobody's bothered to remove the option to triple-click a folder in the Start menu to open it. (Because outside of this example, most people have no reason to know that option's even there.) I once worked at a place that removed the option to set your own desktop wallpaper. They forgot that within Internet Explorer, you could right-click any image and "Set as Wallpaper" it from there.
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Jul 22, 2019 23:30
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Powered Descent posted:I once worked at a place that removed the option to set your own desktop wallpaper. They forgot that within Internet Explorer, you could right-click any image and "Set as Wallpaper" it from there. Great opportunity to set the boss's wallpaper to goatse
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Jul 22, 2019 23:31
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I used to get yelled at in school for increasing the dekstop resolution on the PCs. I'm not working at 640x480 drat it!
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Jul 23, 2019 00:13
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Back in 2000 working at big retail they had "Upgraded" the tills to XP. For some dumb reason they set it to 8bit colour which made the computer waaayyyy slower than if it ran at millions of colours which I set it to every time I am there. It also had a tiny fraction of the features, less useful information, far worse usability than the old green screen system which was rather snappy. Typing was a chore and scrolling was a wishful idea on 8bit. Not as terrible as the high school graphics department where the teacher had the smart idea to buy just 2 computer adding some weird hardware virtualisation cards so 3 students could use one "machine". This is late 90's. That computer got put on the shortest of buses, limps chopped off with a rusty butter knife and tossed down a hole. A 386 was literally 10 times faster doing the same work. Drawing a line was an experience. The mouse cursor moved like a dead Rat. Printing on that machine was "Special", an A4 took an hour and hosed everyone else over. The disk drive thrashed "Kill me". So gently caress that, used the PPC 66 Mac at home with better software, finding immense joy with pen and paper. The teacher was sooo proud of his setup. I don't even, like what... 
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Jul 23, 2019 03:06
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oohhboy posted:The teacher was sooo proud of his setup. I don't even, like what... I mean, it probably took him a solid week to get it set up right.
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Jul 23, 2019 03:47
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How would 8 bit color slow a machine down
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Jul 23, 2019 03:50
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The drivers are meant to work at a higher colour palette. Using 8bit makes it do more work as it constantly has to do pointless dithering with every draw when everything including the desktop is 16bit or higher.
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Jul 23, 2019 03:57
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When I was in high school, the schools used this Windows 98 shell replacement by IBM called SchoolVista, which may not have had wide deployment because I can barely find anything online about it. It was like a school-themed take on the Microsoft Bob crap where they thought computer interfaces should be thematic. The login screen looked like the outside of a school and the screen while logged in looked like a classroom, with an "actual" desktop for your stuff and the programs list was a bookshelf with the different programs they let you use as books with the name of the program on the spines. The approved web browser that you could access through the book shelf was some Netscape 4.x version that at that point wasn't too old but was crusty enough that you had to click through tons of Javascript errors on pages that did anything slightly interesting. There was no approved access to any other browser. However, you could run anything through using File->Open in any program, entering *.exe as the file name to show only exes, browse to the location of it, then right-click->Run it. I figured this out and shared it around so we could all run whatever IE version that the computers had that didn't suck as much as Netscape. We also used it to run games.
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Jul 23, 2019 05:02
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I was at the local community college of the town I was living in at the time, had my laptop with me, and discovered their wireless network was completely open. No login, no password, no nothing. Just a wide-open WiFi network. I could only imagine the terrible things people would do on that network, and was astounded by how incredibly lax it was in security terms. This was in 2011.
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Jul 23, 2019 07:26
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drat, that is pretty bad. I remember reading an article in a computer magazine around 2002 when wireless was still a novelty talking about how many networks you could just connect to openly while walking/driving around a city, but at least that was somewhat forgivable with wireless still being so new at the time. By 2011 that's not really good enough.
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Jul 23, 2019 12:29
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“Wardriving”
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Jul 23, 2019 13:34
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I was in high school during the mid to late 90's, and we had a mishmash of different computers. The 2 dedicated computer labs were Mac Power PCs, and later upgraded to the beefed up iMacs with floppy drives. Typing class room was stocked with nothing but IBM PS/2s. The "computer technology" classrooms were full of Windows 95 PCs. Apparently someone got past security on that one by taking a text file that said only "CMD" and changed the file extension to .exe There was also the office technology classroom/computer lab which was filled with both macs and Apple IIs. I used to wreak havoc in this room because the security on the computers was an extension called Fool Proof, and holding down Command and Option during bootup would disable extensions. I'm also pretty sure I took the last BASIC course there on those Apple IIs, I was always getting scolded because I would add extra functionality to the programs I was supposed to make. That particular teacher was just a wet blanket on everything.
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Jul 23, 2019 13:57
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Iron Crowned posted:I was in high school during the mid to late 90's, and we had a mishmash of different computers. The 2 dedicated computer labs were Mac Power PCs, and later upgraded to the beefed up iMacs with floppy drives. Took PC building in 1997, we were unofficially rebuilding computers for the school district, free labor and such. But the best thing ever happened. My school was pretty new and somehow had a whole cold-room with large servers. They gave some kids in the PC-building 2 class admin access to this, I'm assuming because they thought nothing bad could happen. One day, the most unassuming kid I knew, who had admin access, went into class and nuked the servers. Just flat out nuked everything. The kid was expelled, no-one heard from him again. For 2 weeks after that, ever computer class just did nothing. I was also in Autocad at the time, and we were told to just play on paint for the week, that the servers were busted and nothing could be done until we were back online. I always wished I had the opportunity to thank that kid for his service.
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Jul 23, 2019 14:10
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LifeSunDeath posted:Took PC building in 1997, we were unofficially rebuilding computers for the school district, free labor and such. But the best thing ever happened. My school was pretty new and somehow had a whole cold-room with large servers. They gave some kids in the PC-building 2 class admin access to this, I'm assuming because they thought nothing bad could happen. One day, the most unassuming kid I knew, who had admin access, went into class and nuked the servers. Just flat out nuked everything. The kid was expelled, no-one heard from him again. For 2 weeks after that, ever computer class just did nothing. I was also in Autocad at the time, and we were told to just play on paint for the week, that the servers were busted and nothing could be done until we were back online. I always wished I had the opportunity to thank that kid for his service. For my Computer technology class, we didn't even get to use AutoCad, it was AutoSketch, and for the height of comedy for some reason was renaming it to "AutoSketeh"
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Jul 23, 2019 14:32
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Iron Crowned posted:For my Computer technology class, we didn't even get to use AutoCad, it was AutoSketch, and for the height of comedy for some reason was renaming it to "AutoSketeh" Lol nice. One time in MSOffice class I deleted system32 at the end of the period. A few days later the teacher caught me in the hall and confronted me, "Now I don't want to say you did something but did you happen to notice the computer you were on was not working properly, or did you happen to do something that might have caused it to stop working?" "Oh no way, I would never do anything like that, not me"  Good times.
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Jul 23, 2019 14:54
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Only thing we got up to in our primitive 90s computer classes was playing Scorched Earth
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Jul 23, 2019 14:58
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In the early 90s in 6th grade we had a pair of Mac SE/30 machines in the back. These were all-in-one models with a 9 inch monochrome display, dual internal floppy drives, and one of them had a huge external 40MB SCSI hard drive. They were both supposed to have a hard drive but one was missing, can’t remember the reason. I played with the computers pretty much every day so I was the designated class computer expert even though I didn’t know much. (Had a VIC-20 at home in my room and a Tandy 1000 as the family computer). One day the teacher asked me if there was any way both computers could use the same hard drive so I looked at it and said “sure, I don’t see why not. The hard drove has 2 SCSI ports on the back, and we have 2 SCSI cables.” (SCSI devices could be daisy chained, that’s why it had 2 ports on the back) So I hooked each port up to each Mac and fired up the one on the right first. Worked great! Then I started the one on the left and it worked too! Then I ran a game (I think Scarab of Ra) on the left machine and while it chugged and was slower than normal it did start up. Then I proudly told the teacher “so yeah, this is networking in action.” The I fired up the same game on the other machine. Both machines instantly locked up. I rebooted one and got the question mark floppy icon that means it can’t find a boot device. Started the other and got the same thing. They wouldn’t even boot with the hard drive hooked up to a single machine either. I was never the designated computer expert in class anymore. GutBomb has a new favorite as of 15:17 on Jul 23, 2019 |
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Jul 23, 2019 15:14
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I thought the SE/30 had an internal hard drive  Fun fact: The naming scheme at the time added an "-X" for extended, and they broke the scheme because they thought that a Mac SE-X would have made a bad impression.
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Jul 23, 2019 15:19
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Iron Crowned posted:I thought the SE/30 had an internal hard drive It might have been a regular SE then. All I remember was that it was an all-in-one with the horizontal line design on the front and dual internal floppies.
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Jul 23, 2019 15:29
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GutBomb posted:It might have been a regular SE then. All I remember was that it was an all-in-one with the horizontal line design on the front and dual internal floppies. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that the hard drive replaced the second drive for the SE/30, but they didn't change the housing so there was just a plug where the second drive would be.
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Jul 23, 2019 15:32
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Jim Silly-Balls posted:LGR is great background audio. His voice is soothing AF Soothing voice you say? Meet Perifractic's Retro Recipes:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzeyUJCo8OE fallenturtle has a new favorite as of 17:15 on Jul 23, 2019 |
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Jul 23, 2019 17:13
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The Jack Chop Guy posted:In high school C programming class we learned that ms office Open (as in pick a file to open) windows acted the same as win explorer windows, so even though windows explorer was somehow made unavailable to students, we could just burn poo poo to disc, open the Open boxes in word and excel, navigate to source and destination folders and drag/drop between them back in 1996 we thought we were hot poo poo because we found a way to crash out of Netware to a DOS prompt and install Doom II, and had a script to rename everything once we were done playing to avoid detection. Naturally every other day the teacher would say "oh look, a random 16MB file with a weird name. Better delete the whole folder and hope it doesn't come back." We had a sub one day and started playing Doom on the LAN; we told him we had programmed it and he bought it
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Jul 24, 2019 00:35
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Randaconda posted:Only thing we got up to in our primitive 90s computer classes was playing Scorched Earth I think we only played GORILLAS.BAS and NIBBLES.BAS which came with MS-DOS, I seem to remember hacking nibbles a bit but I don't remember what I did, maybe changed the speed or snake length. We always had floppy disks with us from trading games but I guess we never put them in the machines at school for some reason  GutBomb posted:In the early 90s in 6th grade we had a pair of Mac SE/30 machines in the back. These were all-in-one models with a 9 inch monochrome display, dual internal floppy drives, and one of them had a huge external 40MB SCSI hard drive. I've been reading about SCSI lately and looking into stuff like SCSI2SD and how you can use this stuff with old Macs so you don't need actual spinning SCSI drives. I assume that for this to have not gone badly you would have needed to make all the SCSI IDs unique, and you probably can't change the SCSI IDs of the SCSI cards themselves in the Macs so they're both going to be 7 and get really confused? As a user of cheap PCs I'm amazed by how much power was available to users of Macs and other boxes with SCSI - just being able to have an external drive at all, let alone one that could take the place of an internal one, is something that we didn't get on PC for so much longer unless we actually got SCSI.
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Jul 24, 2019 04:10
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LifeSunDeath posted:Took PC building in 1997, we were unofficially rebuilding computers for the school district, free labor and such. But the best thing ever happened. My school was pretty new and somehow had a whole cold-room with large servers. They gave some kids in the PC-building 2 class admin access to this, I'm assuming because they thought nothing bad could happen. One day, the most unassuming kid I knew, who had admin access, went into class and nuked the servers. Just flat out nuked everything. The kid was expelled, no-one heard from him again. For 2 weeks after that, ever computer class just did nothing. I was also in Autocad at the time, and we were told to just play on paint for the week, that the servers were busted and nothing could be done until we were back online. I always wished I had the opportunity to thank that kid for his service. Around that time I was that kid, expect I switched every PSU of a classroom to 110V instead of our 240V. When the master switch was flipped of the morning. A LOT of magic smoke.
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Jul 24, 2019 09:29
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Humphreys posted:Around that time I was that kid, expect I switched every PSU of a classroom to 110V instead of our 240V. When the master switch was flipped of the morning. A LOT of magic smoke. I've heard that's pretty destructive? Does it only kill the PSU or also internal components?
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Jul 24, 2019 10:12
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Buttcoin purse posted:I've heard that's pretty destructive? Does it only kill the PSU or also internal components? I can tell you that some PSUs have a 110/220 switch, and if you flip it while the computer is running it fries the whole goddamn thing and trips the fuse box.
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Jul 24, 2019 10:47
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